San Francisco DA Jenkins Enters State Bar Diversion Program after Ethics Complaint

Brooke Jenkins at a forum in 2023 – photo by David Greenwald

Jenkins is accused of multiple ethics violations, including handling confidential records improperly.

In a rare and potentially far-reaching decision, the State Bar of California has required San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins to complete a confidential diversion program in response to multiple ethics complaints. 

While the State Bar stopped short of issuing formal discipline, its action is nearly unprecedented in the realm of prosecutorial misconduct—especially for an elected official of Jenkins’ stature.

At the heart of the controversy is a letter dated March 25, 2025, from the Office of Chief Trial Counsel (OCTC), addressed to retired Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Martha Goldin, a complainant in the case. 

“While there are significant evidentiary issues with establishing the complaint allegations by clear and convincing evidence (our burden at any disciplinary hearing), there is evidence that Jenkins should not have accessed or handled McAlister’s rap sheet in the way she did given the statutory limits on access and use of criminal history information,” the State Bar concluded in a letter to another complainant, Alexandra Grayner, who worked as a prosecutor under Boudin.

The State Bar concluded that Jenkins’ conduct raised enough red flags to warrant enrollment in the diversion program—a reform-oriented track typically reserved for attorneys facing relatively minor ethical breaches. 

But given the gravity and number of allegations, the confidential nature of the outcome raises profound questions about transparency, accountability, and the limits of legal oversight when it comes to prosecutors.

Jenkins, who rose to prominence after quitting her job as an assistant district attorney under Chesa Boudin and serving as a public face of the recall campaign that removed him from office, has long been a lightning rod for controversy. 

The ethics complaints against her—five in total, filed between 2022 and 2023—touch on a wide range of conduct: the improper handling of a confidential rap sheet, misstatements during public debates, undisclosed financial entanglements with political nonprofits, and alleged discovery violations in criminal prosecutions.

In the State Bar’s letter to Grayner, the most substantial finding centered on Jenkins’ handling of the criminal history of Troy McAlister, a parolee whose case became a central flashpoint in the campaign to recall Boudin. 

According to the letter, Jenkins emailed McAlister’s rap sheet from her work account to the personal email address of Don du Bain, a fellow former prosecutor who had also joined the recall campaign. Neither Jenkins nor du Bain was assigned to the McAlister case at the time.

McAlister’s rap sheet was later posted on the campaign website supporting Boudin’s recall. Jenkins denied leaking the rap sheet to the campaign, stating she merely shared it with du Bain in a moment of frustration. 

“She pulled up his record to familiarize herself with the case,” the letter states, adding that Jenkins “sent the rap sheet to du Bain’s private email rather than his work account by mistake, surmising that the system must have auto-filled his personal email address when she started typing D-O-N.”

Despite this explanation, the State Bar found the evidence troubling. 

“There is evidence that Jenkins should not have accessed or handled McAlister’s rap sheet in the way she did given the statutory limits on access and use of criminal history information,” the letter states. 

While the Bar acknowledged it would likely fall short of proving misconduct by “clear and convincing evidence,” it nonetheless opted to refer Jenkins to diversion—a clear signal of concern.

The McAlister episode was not the only matter raised. Jenkins’ handling of the Daniel Gudino case, involving a severely mentally ill man charged with killing his mother, drew sharp criticism from Goldin and others. 

Despite what the complainant described as “overwhelming evidence” that Gudino should have been institutionalized, Jenkins pursued incarceration.

Jenkins defended her conduct, arguing she was fulfilling her duty to “represent the people” under Rule 1.3(a) of the Rules of Professional Conduct. She also cited inconsistencies in the defense’s expert testimony and claimed that crucial evidence about Gudino’s past threats had only come to light late in the proceedings. 

Nonetheless, she acknowledged that this clash with Boudin contributed to her decision to resign.

Moreover, in 2023, a Court of Appeal found that Jenkins committed misconduct in their closing argument, and the State Bar failed to mention it all.

Judge Goldin in her complaint alleges, from a 2019 Vanguard article, “In 2019, then Assistant District Attorney Jenkins was tape recorded instructing a 4- or 5-year-old child witness (the alleged victim in the case Jenkins was prosecuting). Jenkins told the child what she should state on the witness stand, “Say that – that’s what you need to say.””

Despite the issue being raised before a judge in 2019 during the trial, and the investigator from the Public Defender’s Office having testified and shown his camera video, the Bar cleared Jenkins on this one, “The State Bar reviewed relevant court records and did not find evidence to support this allegation.”

Also at issue was Jenkins’ statement during a public debate on September 13, 2022, in which she claimed: “Never have I ever been found to have committed misconduct in a case … that is one thing I will stand up for, which is my reputation, which is unchallenged in that courthouse.” 

Yet, as documented by the State Bar, Jenkins had previously committed what’s known as a Griffin error—commenting on a defendant’s decision not to testify—in the case People v. Ronnie Wilborn. The error contributed to the overturning of Wilborn’s conviction.

Jenkins maintained that the incident was not misconduct but an honest mistake made early in her legal career. 

“She naively repeated the judge who first made the error,” the State Bar letter summarizes, adding that she was under debate pressure and did not consider a Griffin error to be equivalent to witness tampering or a Brady violation.

The complaints also addressed Jenkins’ financial entanglements with nonprofit organizations during the recall campaign. Jenkins had long insisted she served as a volunteer, but later disclosures revealed she was paid more than $173,000 by three nonprofits with close ties to the effort. 

Her defense was that she was not compensated by the campaign PAC itself, and that confusion stemmed from the similar names of the 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) entities. 

“The mere fact that she provided consulting services to 501(c)(3) organizations… did not mean she was a paid campaign worker of the PAC,” the letter states.

In opting for diversion, the State Bar took an unusual step—one that simultaneously acknowledges misconduct while offering a rehabilitative alternative to formal discipline. 

“We have decided that your complaint is best resolved by requiring the attorney to participate in OCTC’s diversion program,” the Bar wrote to Goldin. 

Retired Judge Martha Goldin’s complaint to the State Bar, originally filed in October 2022 and supplemented through 2023, offers a scathing and meticulously detailed account of what she alleges is a pattern of misconduct by Brooke Jenkins.

In her own words, Goldin wrote that Jenkins “has engaged in a continuing course of deceitful and dishonest conduct in violation of State Bar Rules of Professional Conduct,” especially Rule 8.4(c), which prohibits dishonesty, fraud, or misrepresentation by an attorney.

The complaint lays out a wide-ranging case:

• False Statements About Past Misconduct: Goldin emphasized that Jenkins publicly claimed she had “never been found to have committed misconduct in a case,” even though the Appellate Division of the San Francisco Superior Court reversed a conviction she prosecuted due to a Griffin error. “Jenkins publicly and falsely claiming that she has never been found to have committed misconduct is deceitful and dishonest conduct,” the complaint states. “It is the exact conduct which is prohibited by Rule 8.4(c).”
  
• Misrepresentation of Role in Recall Campaign: Jenkins described herself as a volunteer for the effort to recall her former boss, Chesa Boudin. However, her legally required Form 700 filings disclosed over $173,000 in compensation from nonprofits closely tied to the recall. Goldin argued this represented “false and misleading representations,” and pointed to the tangled relationships between Jenkins, the nonprofits, and political consultants. “In the best light,” Goldin wrote, “it is not unreasonable to conclude that Jenkins lied when she held herself out as a volunteer.”
  
• Handling of Confidential Criminal Records: The most legally serious allegation involves Jenkins’ unauthorized dissemination of a rap sheet. On October 9, 2021, days before officially leaving the District Attorney’s office, Jenkins emailed the confidential police reports and summary criminal history of Troy McAlister to a personal email address belonging to fellow resigning prosecutor Don du Bain. “It is undisputed that… Brooke Jenkins illegally took possession of and emailed the McAlister documents that she was not authorized to access,” Goldin wrote. “Her criminal acts involve moral turpitude, dishonesty, and corruption, and they must be sanctioned.”
  
• Potential Criminal Violations: The complaint doesn’t stop at ethics. Citing California Penal Code sections 11142 and 13302, Goldin alleged Jenkins committed misdemeanors by furnishing confidential criminal history information to someone not authorized to receive it.
  
• Gift Disclosure and Alleged Perjury: Goldin also flagged Jenkins’ acceptance of front-row courtside Warriors tickets from a political donor, which were valued at over $3,800. Jenkins disclosed them as $500 on her Form 700. “Her decision to accept the ticket and attend the game on December 5, 2022 appears to be a misdemeanor violation… Her subsequent decision… to report the value of the gift as only $500… appears to be felony perjury,” Goldin wrote in a June 2023 supplement to her complaint.

If Jenkins completes the program, which can last between 180 and 365 days, the case will be closed. If she fails to comply, the State Bar may reopen the case and pursue disciplinary charges.

Yet this resolution comes with a significant catch: the diversion process is confidential. 

The Bar’s letter states unequivocally that Jenkins’ participation “has not been disclosed to anyone except you and the attorney.” 

For most private attorneys, such confidentiality is standard. But Jenkins is not a private attorney—she is an elected official managing a public office with a nearly $100 million annual budget and a mandate to uphold legal ethics.

That distinction raises serious questions about transparency. Jenkins has not publicly acknowledged her enrollment in the diversion program, nor has she disclosed the scope of the allegations addressed, the timeline for compliance, or what steps she is required to complete. 

The San Francisco Chronicle article covering the story noted that Jenkins declined to answer questions about what her participation would entail or whether it included ethics training.

Even more troubling is the possibility that this case could have followed a far more common and opaque path. 

As noted in a report by the Northern California Innocence Project, of 707 California cases in which prosecutorial misconduct was found over an 11-year period, only six prosecutors were formally disciplined by the State Bar. 

Most complaints are quietly closed without explanation, often after years of delay. That makes the action against Jenkins all the more remarkable—and underscores just how rare it is for prosecutorial misconduct to face even this limited form of accountability.

Jenkins’ defenders have called the complaints politically motivated, filed by supporters of Chesa Boudin in the wake of a contentious recall election. 

In her public statement, Jenkins said, “Political opponents, who were ardent supporters of Chesa, attempted to weaponize the State Bar’s complaint process.” 

But critics argue that political context cannot excuse ethical breaches—particularly by a prosecutor who has built her platform on restoring public trust in the legal system.

Perhaps most ironic is the fact that Jenkins has frequently criticized the overuse of diversion in the criminal courts. Her predecessor had embraced diversion as a tool for reducing incarceration and addressing root causes of crime, but Jenkins has curtailed its use, arguing that too many defendants abuse the opportunity. 

The diversion program itself, now codified as part of the State Bar’s rules, is meant to promote rehabilitation and public protection. 

According to the Bar, diversion “furthers public protection by providing specific deterrence of similar misconduct by the same attorney, through education, direction, warning, or the imposition of conditions.” 

But the confidentiality built into the process stands in stark tension with the demands of public office.

San Francisco Public Defender Mano Raju on the State Bar’s decision: “Prosecutors are rarely disciplined for breaches of professional ethics, so this decision by the State Bar ordering District Attorney Brooke Jenkins to take corrective action, speaks volumes.”

He added,  “It’s ironic that District Attorney Jenkins, who often opposes diversion in court—and thereby closes off an avenue for our clients to better their lives—has now been ordered to complete professional diversion. 

“When an elected District Attorney has a history of ethical violations, it undermines the integrity of the entire District Attorney’s Office and can lead to wrongful convictions and unjust incarceration.” 

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