SAN FRANCISCO, CA — “My client is not only innocent, he is the victim,” declared Deputy Public Defender Ilona Yañez this week, speaking on behalf of her client Jerry Williams, a 53-year-old Black man and San Francisco resident.
A press statement released by the SF Public Defender’s Office reports Williams was falsely charged with assault and several additional crimes following an altercation on a MUNI bus April 16.
“Mr. Williams would never have gone to jail had he not been a Black man on parole,” said elected San Francisco Public Defender Mano Raju, adding “…Police did not believe him and that they used his parole status against him instead of actually investigating the incident to find the truth. The result was another innocent Black man in jail whose life and livelihood was disrupted because police wrongly deemed him to be the aggressor when he was actually the victim.”
On April 16, surveillance footage from MUNI shows Williams mistakenly dropping cash on the floor while boarding a bus; behind him, the alleged victim picked it up.
A released statement from the SF Public Defender’s Office states, “Williams asked the man for his money back, and the man denied taking the cash, even though other passengers can be heard on the footage telling him to give it back. The man pushed his umbrella at Williams, who stopped it with his hand as he continued to ask for his money back. The man then reached out, grabbed and scratched Williams’ face, and Williams responded with a single punch in self-defense.”
The press release even acknowledges that Williams waited for police and gave a detailed statement, “begging” the officers to look at the MUNI footage that would fully support his account.
Failing to search the alleged victim for the missing cash, officers ran a background check on Williams, saw he was on parole, and arrested him instead of the alleged victim, who appears to be white, the statement notes. The statement asserts that Willaims was then charged with felony elder abuse and felony assault and prosecutors insisted he remain in custody.
DPD Yañez informed the press that Williams was “kept in jail for two weeks, missed classes…(and) was at risk of losing his housing, (this) is emblematic of the harms caused by police bias and prosecutors’ insistence on unnecessary pretrial detention.”
While incarcerated, Williams was exposed to the additional hardships of experiencing lockdowns because of COVID issues and overcrowding, as stated by the released statement.
Although prosecutors dropped all charges on May 24, for DPD Yañez and Williams, it doesn’t end there; they believe that race was a factor in the officers’ decisions, as well as bias against Williams for being on parole even though he was a “model parolee.”
Williams has since successfully been released from parole and is working alongside DPD Yañez in this case, the release notes.
Screenshots of MUNI surveillance footage are below. (Note: these images can also be found here.)
