By Darling Gonzalez
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – Brooke Jenkins, a former homicide prosecutor, quit Oct. 15 due to what she described to news media as personal disagreements with District Attorney Chesa Boudin, and Boudin’s leadership actions. Reportedly, about 50 lawyers have left during Boudin’s tenure.
Jenkins’ disagreements with Boudin’s strategies include supposed “chaotic management” as well as “ideologically driven decisions” in the current DA ‘s office.
Jenkins said that she agrees with the main focus of Boudin’s campaign, that the criminal justice system is racist and is in need of reform.
However, Jenkins sees a lot of day-to-day handling of cases that have ended badly for victims and their families under Boudin, including her own, she has noted to Bay Area media outlets.
Supporters of Boudin assert many of the resignations may be reflections of the process of reforming the broken criminal justice system and making changes that many career prosecutors are upset about.
Lara Bazelon, a law professor at University of San Francisco, says she is confident that Boudin is properly running the office.
Bazelon claims, “When you’re implementing new policies, which is what’s happening in San Francisco, there’s going to be friction…there’s going to be some 
people who don’t feel like that’s what they signed up to do, but that’s not the same thing as chaos.”
Jenkins’ personal connection with a criminal case under Boudin is that of her husband’s 18-year-old cousin, Jerome Mallory, who was fatally shot in the Bayview neighborhood on July 5, 2020.
According to Jenkins and her family, Mallory was an innocent bystander in a gang dispute and the prosecution of his alleged killers were “ineffective” under Boudin’s charge.
When taking the office of District Attorney, Boudin announced he would not seek gang-related sentencing enhancements except in “extraordinary circumstances” as it majorly affected and unfairly punished Black and Latino men because of the ways gangs have been defined and targeted.
According to California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation data from 2019, more than 90 percent of adults with a gang enhancement in state prison were either Black or Latinx.
Boudin’s reformed policy does not seek gang-related sentencing enhancements and claims that the “San Francisco District Attorney’s Office enhancements policy [will] no longer [contribute] to over-incarceration, racial disparities and disproportionate punishments.”
Jenkins claimed Boudin was resistant to filing felony charges of gang conspiracy and she felt that in Mallory’s case things should have been dealt with differently.
She believed in the case of her family member, Mallory, the alleged killers should have been charged with felony charges of gang conspiracy.
Jenkins claimed that there were some cases, like Mallory’s, that needed to be pushed forward and filing gang charges was the way to do that.
Ultimately, the four men involved with Mallory’s shooting were charged by the DA’s office, but not on gang charges.
Jenkins also claimed Boudin’s centralization of ideology trumps public safety.
She described an example of how one of the men involved with Mallory’s shooting, Sincere Pomar, allegedly injured a child in his care and weeks later, allegedly committed attempted murder after being released from custody.
Jenkins said that if Pomar had been held for Mallory’s murder, those events would not have happened.
The traditionally conservative police officers union and some residents concerned about crime have been the majority of people who criticize Boudin’s leadership.
With less than two years into his tenure, Boudin has been unfairly blamed, his supporters claim, for a myriad of small scale problems, including things like Walgreens closures to car break-ins.
On Friday, Boudin replied to the concerns of high turnover and low morale by advocating for the work of his current staff and indicating that the recent problems would ultimately be short-term.
“Obviously high levels of turnover can create short-term problems,” he said. “But it’s great to have new energy and people who are excited about coming to work for the office and serving the city.”
Boudin was surprised by Jenkins’ decision to publicly share her frustrations with his office because he had recently promoted her to the homicide unit, noting, “Usually when you promote people, they think you have good judgment.”
Jenkins’ reason for quitting was cemented, she said, when Boudin made an immediate decision in a case where she was the prosecutor.
Daniel Gudino, 29, had been charged with allegedly killing his mother and mutilating her corpse in April of last year..
Jenkins had secured a guilty verdict in court, but the jury was hung when Jenkins attempted to prove Gudino’s sanity during the crime.
Jenkins had then allegedly agreed with the public defender to allow the judge to decide the matter of insanity, when she was informed by an intermediary that DA Boudin had agreed to find Gudino insane at the public defender’s request.
Boudin explained that there was a clear indication that Gudino was insane at the time of the killing.
Chief attorney for the public defender’s office, Matt Gonzalez, said Boudin gave Jenkins leeway to try the case in court because most DAs would have deemed Gudino insane from the start.
“I have the ultimate decision-making power,” Boudin said. “She won her case. I was proud of her work.”
” . . . . that the recent problems would ultimately be short-term.”
Now there’s a phrase you don’t hear every day.