- “The crux of the issue is that we have been and continue to be in the red zone.” – Hadi Razzaq
- “It can’t be an imperfect world for public defenders because that’s constitutionally not allowed.” – Hadi Razzaq
SAN FRANCISCO — A month into emergency hearings over whether San Francisco’s Public Defender’s Office is too overloaded to accept new felony cases, Assistant Chief Public Defender Hadi Razzaq told Judge Harry Dorfman on Tuesday that the office is operating in what he called the “red zone” — and that the Constitution does not allow the system to simply accept that as the new normal.
“The crux of the issue is that we have been and continue to be in the red zone,” Razzaq said during a Nov. 25 session in Department 19, referring to an overextended state where attorneys can no longer meet their ethical and constitutional obligations to clients.
The hearing highlighted a clash of frameworks that has defined the weeks-long unavailability proceedings.
Deputy District Attorney Ana Gonzalez has previously argued that the public defender has an abundance of felony-qualified attorneys, suggesting the office has more capacity than it claims.
Razzaq pushed back, saying that what looks like “abundance” on paper is actually a roster of lawyers already pushed into crisis-level workloads.
“There was abandonment, the other word was abundance,” Razzaq said, framing the debate as a choice between abandoning existing clients or acknowledging that the system cannot simply pile more cases onto already overburdened lawyers.
Dorfman repeatedly returned to what he called the realities of an “imperfect world,” where judges, prosecutors and defenders all operate under constraints.
“Everybody wishes the world were more perfect. Everybody deals with the reality,” Dorfman said, adding that he must balance those realities with his obligation to appoint counsel. “The Constitution, since I’m sitting here, orders me as I see it to provide a Gideon lawyer, right, every felony defendant is entitled to a qualified lawyer. I have a constitutional command.”
Razzaq answered that the system’s imperfections cannot be allowed to fall hardest on people who cannot afford an attorney.
“It can’t be an imperfect world for public defenders because that’s constitutionally not allowed,” he said.
To rebut the “abundance” narrative, Razzaq laid out comparisons to neighboring counties. He told the court that Alameda County’s misdemeanor trial attorneys average about 82 cases per lawyer and felony trial attorneys carry an average of 41 trial matters.
In Alameda, he said, there is a separate preliminary hearing team that works up cases before they are sent to felony trial lawyers, allowing those trial attorneys to focus on trial preparation instead of handling every stage of a case.
In Contra Costa County, Razzaq said, felony attorneys represent roughly 25 to 30 clients, which translates to about 35 to 40 cases per felony trial lawyer. On the misdemeanor side, after clarifying earlier testimony, he said the average misdemeanor attorney there carries about 135 cases when diversion and post-conviction matters are included.
By contrast, Razzaq told the court that San Francisco misdemeanor lawyers average 147 cases each, and that many of the office’s felony caseloads run 50 to 75 percent higher than in Contra Costa.
He argued that even where the raw misdemeanor numbers look relatively close, the much heavier felony workload in San Francisco means the overall strain on the office is dramatically greater.
He said that matching Contra Costa’s average misdemeanor caseload would require two to three additional misdemeanor attorneys in San Francisco, even before addressing the heavier felony burden.
Razzaq also described how high workloads ripple into core defense functions. With lawyers in the red zone, he said, there is less attorney time per client, fewer visits to people in jail, and less time for investigation, legal research and reviewing discovery such as surveillance video, cell phone records and social media.
He told Dorfman that many of the office’s most critical units have already been cannibalized to shore up felony and misdemeanor coverage. He pointed to the pre-arraignment or pretrial release unit, which he helped build in 2017 to meet with people in jail between booking and arraignment.
Razzaq said that unit — staffed by a part-time attorney, a paralegal and investigators on rotation — tries to reach people in the jail within about 24 hours to advise them before police questioning or media contact and to secure time-sensitive evidence.
He cited a study by the Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy that found individuals who met with someone from the pretrial release unit “were twice as likely to be released at arraignment when compared to similarly situated individuals who did not have the same type of representation,” and said that early representation helps people keep jobs, maintain housing and remain connected to their families and schools.
Despite that impact, Razzaq said the office can only reach roughly 20 percent of people in custody before arraignment, and has already pulled resources away from the unit because of felony and misdemeanor caseloads. He argued that cutting further into pretrial work to free up lawyers for new felonies would meaningfully harm people’s chances at release and a fair outcome.
Dorfman questioned whether, in a world of limited resources, it might be “reasonable” to shift more attorneys from pretrial work into trial units, even if the pre-arraignment work is valuable.
The judge stressed he does not want to micromanage the public defender’s internal staffing, but said he cannot ignore that the Constitution compels him to provide lawyers for people facing felony charges.
Razzaq responded that redirecting those staff would cross the line into judicial control of defense strategy and would further erode constitutionally required representation.
He made a similar argument about other specialized units that the office has been unable to fully staff, including immigration and youth defense.
Razzaq said the immigration unit would like to provide deportation defense to every person who asks, but often must turn people away.
He noted that immigrants represented by counsel in removal proceedings are five times more likely to win their cases, and said the office has been forced to keep attorneys out of immigration work because of the felony and misdemeanor crunch.
On the youth defender side, Razzaq said six attorneys — all felony-qualified — handle 30 to 40 cases each, most of them serious and violent felonies under Welfare and Institutions Code section 707.
By statute, he noted, juvenile defenders must continue their representation through the post-disposition phase, meaning post-disposition work is “not optional” but required by law. Several youth defenders also handle adult homicide cases in the Hall of Justice, he said, on top of juvenile and sealing work.
The hearing also showed how the red zone debate reaches beyond front-line trial attorneys into the ranks of managers and research lawyers. Dorfman pointed out that some felony managers carry 17 cases while others have as few as four, and asked whether those with lower caseloads had “room” to take more.
Razzaq said managers supervising 14 to 16 attorneys are already “overextended” even with four serious felony cases, and that national workload standards recommend that public defender managers supervise no more than 10 lawyers and carry no cases at all. Assigning more trials to those managers, he argued, would hollow out supervision and training that the judge himself has said he values.
Dorfman acknowledged the importance of supervision but said his constitutional duty is to ensure that each person charged with a felony has competent counsel, not to guarantee ideal managerial structures.
“The best representation for everybody accused is the goal,” Dorfman said. “And I think you’re sincere and committed to it. But there is room… that talented, hardworking lawyers who are qualified… sometimes can do more than they thought they could do.”
Razzaq warned that the court cannot treat lawyer capacity as infinitely elastic.
“When you’re working… you can’t grind on stuff,” he said, describing attorneys who are constantly in trial and then expected to immediately take on more cases. He told the court that if it insists on assigning additional cases to lawyers already in the red zone, it will be “add[ing] more to the red zone” and pushing the office into what he called abandonment of its current clients.
“Abandonment would be not provided effective representation to our existing clients,” Razzaq said, adding that the most common complaint the office receives is from people in jail and their families saying they have not seen their lawyer enough and do not know what is happening in their case.
Dorfman said he accepts that many public defenders are “busy” and “overworked,” but told the parties he is “not yet fully persuaded that every felony qualified lawyer is in that red zone.”
“There is a complicated story here,” he said, adding that he is still weighing whether to agree “top to bottom” with the office’s declaration of unavailability.
Razzaq told the judge he plans to return next week with a detailed comparison of 2019 and current caseloads, along with national workload standards, to show that “by every measure” conditions have worsened.
For now, the courtroom remains caught between Gonzalez’s frame of abundance, Dorfman’s description of an imperfect world and Razzaq’s warning that the public defender’s office is already past the constitutional breaking point.
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