Ravanell is a not a good person. He is a member of Down Below Gang in the Sunnydale projects. One of Ravanell’s arrests occurred in 2018 when he was accused of shooting at others in the Sunnydale housing developments. His public defender was non-other than Chesa Boudin.
During the DA Gascón-era prosecution, an SFPD source provided confidential sensitive information on Ravanell’s case, which, had it been exposed, would have likely got the source killed. Boudin was livid about the use of a confidential transcript because he thought the information might have threads to other cases.
Judge Brendan Conroy, part of the former SF public defender alumni, reviewed the confidential information privately in his chambers. Numerous sources have cited Conroy as the judge most shopped for by public defenders and Boudin as DA to obtain a pro-defendant ruling. Conroy aligned with Ravanell and decided that he was not going allow the information to remain sealed. So, rather than risk a chance of retaliation on the source’s life, on December 12, 2018, the Gascón-era prosecution team decided to drop both the case and charges against Ravanell.
January 2020, Boudin was elected San Francisco District Attorney with 64% of SF voters choosing another candidate as their first choice.
On January 6, 2021, Ravanell was arrested with an assault rifle on a new case. Per numerous SFPD officers, subsequent shootings in the Ingleside after Ravanell’s January arrest[1] collapsed faster than a meme stock. But more importantly, his arrest meant that Chesa Boudin, now as SF’s District Attorney, had a conflict because Ravanell had been his client when he was a public defender. But Boudin has a history of ignoring conflicts of interest when he is a participant.
Motion to unseal transcripts
Eric Quant had been a career San Francisco public defender. On February 4, 2021, almost immediately after he was hired by Boudin in the DA’s office, he was sent by Boudin to Department 22 to petition the unsealing of the confidential information in the Ravanell case, though the charges against Ravanell had been dropped and the case was dead. There existed the glaring question of what possible reason did Quant, a public defender only a few weeks before, have in getting information for Boudin’s client when he was a public defender? Apparently, Boudin was still curious about the potential tentacles in the sealed information on his case as a public defender.
And exactly like Boudin’s office withheld evidence from SFPD on the Officer Stengal case, Boudin tried to sneak in the unsealing petition without SFPD’s attorneys’ knowledge and ability to protest.
Presiding Judge Loretta Giorgi recognized Boudin’s conflict and postponed the matter until February 24, 2021, so that the California Attorney General could weigh in on the controversy.
On February 24th, Quandt painted the picture that the DA’s office desperately needed to know what the confidential information was because it involved another unrelated case. Further, the court transcripts document that Judge Giorgi analyzed the unsealing of the confidential information was not to be precluded from the entire DA’s office—just Boudin: “The (confidential information) sealed items were away from his (Boudin’s) eyes only.”
Quandt responded, “He (Boudin) is walled off.”
SFPD Attorney Kara Lacey cited the Lepe[2] case as precedence whereby, “When it’s the actual District Attorney that’s walled off, that often times is not sufficient because everyone in that office answers to the District Attorney. They could be fired by the District Attorney.” Which of course, per former DA Independent Investigation Bureau Lieutenant Jeffery Pailet’s lawsuit, and Inspector Magen Hayshi’s court testimony, noncompliance with Boudin’s manifesto resulted in threats of termination or actual firings.
Peter Flores representing the Attorney General’s office (remotely on video) stated: “There is a presumption that District Attorneys and actually all government officials are following their rules and doing their duties, you know properly? So that’s the presumption we start with.” Flores’ comments seem disconnected to fact that two SF groups had already sought approval of recall petitions of DA Boudin for the perceived failure to complete the tasks he swore under oath to pursue.
Flores’ comments allowed Judge Giorgi to rule: “I am going to go ahead and authorize the release of the sealed transcript, but only for Mr. Quandt’s eyes only at this point. To further share it, then we will have further hearings on it.”
Quandt returns to public defender’s office:
In November 2021, after a short stint in the DA’s office, Eric Quandt returned to the public defender’s office. This means, as a Trojan horse in the DA’s office, Quandt had effectively hacked SFPD’s confidential file, obtaining sealed and sensitive information from a dead case, so that he could share it with the public defender network. And of course, we are to believe Quant never shared the information with Boudin.
Many people have accused Boudin of managing the DA’s office with the mentality of a public defender. With the Ravanell case, in form Boudin is San Francisco’s sworn prosecutor, while in substance, he was clearly acting as a public defender.
Boudin as a snitch
Though Boudin is against confidential testimony or confidential informants, hypocritically he has acted as one himself. For the first 9 months of his term DA, homicides were up 28%, burglaries up 44%, and stolen cars up 48%. However, Boudin’s focus was not on exploding crime trends, rewarding disturbing the peace misdemeanors for armed robberies, or mental health diversion for a person that committed 19 takeover robberies, his concern was that an SFPD officer was seen wearing a blue lives matter face mask. Obtained through a public records request, on September 30, 2020, Boudin tattled to SFPD Chief Scott through a text that included a photo.
Evidence of a small man.
[1] As measured by Shotspotter
[2] People vs Lepe, 164 Cal App. 3(d) 685
Scoundrels!
The same Eric Quandt assigned by Chesa to Homicide for a few weeks to review Brooke Jenkins’ cases after she quit…and then returned to the Public Defender’s office.