Finally, Boudin’s Records Response: More Prevarications
His convoluted statistical shell game must be audited
My most recent article deduced a preposterous claim that District Attorney Chesa Boudin most likely had not achieved a single felony conviction of a drug dealer over his first two years in office. On December 7, 2021, I submitted a public records request to the DA’s office asking for documentation Boudin “convicted a single person of a felony 11352, 11351, 11351.5 Health & Safety Code violation.” The specificity of the code sections was to prevent Boudin’s office from claiming a felony drug conviction for a loitering or disturbing the peace conviction that Boudin frequently lets drug dealer plead to.
After an email exchange clarifying the definitions of “prosecution,” Boudin’s office went silent to my request.
My reminder to Robyn Burke:
However, my recent article must have caused reputational concern, because 36-days after our email exchange, the DA’s confidential assistant, Robyn Burke, finally replied to my public records request, with the excuse she missed my (two) follow-up request(s). A 26-day violation of the Sunshine Ordinance by our District Attorney.
Burke’s response included a list of 146 felony cases that the DA’s office claims resulted in a felony drug-selling conviction. Despite this large volume of cases, I still could not verify whether Boudin prosecuted a single case to a felony drug dealing conviction. Approximately 97% of the same “felony cases” that Burke provided to me were recently disclosed as non-felony or misdemeanor drug cases in the DA’s records response to Stop SF Crime. Therefore, one of Boudin’s responses must be a misrepresentation of the truth.
My analysis proving the DA’s deceitful records response
Step #1: Eliminate violent felons with incidental narcotics charges:
Ms. Burke qualified her list of 146 narcotics cases, in that it is a “smaller universe” of defendants that are arrested exclusively for the narcotics sections. Nine of Burke’s drug cases included violent crimes, such as one defendant’s five violent robberies, where the narcotics portion of the plea was incidental to the major crimes that the robber plead to. Therefore, I stripped out the nine violent crimes, which reduced Burke’s “felony narcotics convictions” to 137.
Step #2: In a 25% sampling, 80% of Boudin’s felonies were actually misdemeanors:
From the remaining 137 narcotics-exclusive-convictions Burke provided, I selected 35 cases (25%) to validate if Boudin in fact achieved a felony conviction of a drug dealer. The 35-case sample was split between the first and most recent cases of Boudin’s term to see if he changed his prosecutorial policy. Then I cross-referenced the 35-sample against the Stop Crime SF’s database obtained from public record responses they received from Boudin’s office.
Per my reconciling, 28 of the 35 cases (80%) that Burke reported were felony narcotics-selling convictions to me were reported as misdemeanor convictions to Stop Crime SF. As an example, court #’s 21 009 183 and 21 007 630 were reported as misdemeanors to Stop Crime SF, while Burke disclosure to me represented the same cases as felonies. Thus, the DA’s office lied to either Stop Crime SF or to me.
Step #3: File felony narcotics-selling cases, then bait-and-switch to non-narcotics convictions
In six of the other 35 cases that Burke documented as felony narcotics-selling convictions, the defendant was allowed to plead exclusively to the Penal Code Section 32, an Accessory After the Fact, whereby the defendants’ narcotics charges were completely dropped. Section 32 is a non-drug related statute, almost always a misdemeanor, and SFPD never-ever arrests a narcotics dealer for this section. It is a crime that is added on after Boudin touches the case and is structured so that if the defendant meets certain conditions like restitution or no subsequent narcotics-selling arrests for a period, the felony automatically can revert down to a misdemeanor. Section 32 is Boudin’s loophole to obtain a felony stat while skirting a permanent felony narcotics conviction.
In one these six cases, Boudin combined six narcotics selling arrests (November 2019, December 2019, July 2020, September 2020, and two in April 2021) and let the defendant plead to a single accessory after the fact conviction, while no narcotics conviction will go on the seller’s record.
Burke claiming a Section 32 crime is a narcotics crime is tantamount to SFPD delivering a murderer to Boudin and him claiming a felony murder conviction because he let the murderer plead to a car break-in. It is typical Boudin disinformation.
Step #4: one conviction was unclear
Here’s the good news for Boudin: In court case #21 009 946, Boudin merged several of a defendant’s narcotics arrests. From the Stop Crime SF database, it is unclear what the defendant was finally convicted of. Because of this, I gave Boudin the benefit of the doubt that he may have achieved a single felony out of the 35-sample set.
But more importantly, that also means that 97% of what Burke reported to me (34 of 35 in sample) were not narcotics felonies, but misdemeanors or loophole non-narcotics cases. Talk about misrepresenting the truth!
My follow-up question to Robyn Burke has gone unanswered
To at least give Boudin’s office an opportunity to provide clarity, I presented Robyn Burke with the following email. As expected, the DA’s office has gone silent—again!
The disappearing drug dealing cases from Heather Knight’s column
In March of 2021, Boudin was quoted on 60 Minutes, “I need the police department (SFPD) to bring me kilos not crumbs.” In the Chronicle’s Heather Knight’s recent column, she claimed that SFPD made 489 drug dealing arrests and seized 48 kilos of narcotics in just 2021. However, in Burke’s January 12th public response only 42 of the DA’s claimed narcotics selling convictions occurred in 2021. This raises three questions:
1) What happened to the other 447 (489-42) drug dealers in Knight’s column? Did Boudin give them even lesser consequences than a misdemeanor?
2) Despite slamming San Francisco police officers about “crumbs,” SFPD seized more kilos (48), than Boudin achieved misdemeanor, non-narcotics convictions (42),
3) Why did Boudin’s misdemeanor drug convictions fall a dramatic 60% from 2020 to 2021? (104 to 42)
Boudin’s Houdini-style of illusions
As I have previously beaten-to-death, Boudin constantly misleads the public with the legal jargon of, I file more cases, I prosecute more cases, I charge more cases, I take action more frequently—all synonyms that merely mean he pondered a case without trying to move it forward.
Now, when Boudin is cornered on felony narcotics-selling convictions, we find his office:
1) Provides different public record responses to different requestors,
2) Misrepresents misdemeanor convictions as felony convictions, and
3) Claims that a crime under the California Penal Code crime is actually a California Health & Safety Code narcotics crime.
More concerning, I have only explored Boudin’s narcotics statistics here. Boudin kissed-off Troy McAllister’s takeover robbery so that he would eventually murder to innocents on New Year’s Eve. From my earlier article, Boudin also let an armed robber plead to a disturbing the peace. So why shouldn’t the Mayor, the Feds, and the voters extrapolate that Boudin’s narcotics Houdini-recordkeeping also applies to murders, robberies, and hot prowls that he might being prosecuting as vehicle code violations?
Boudin relies on misdirects, jargon, and dishonesty, which demands an audit of the convictions he achieves to flush out the damage from his prosecutorial sabotage.