Public Defender Tells Judge SFPD Officers Are Like Priests that Molest Children

And the missing context from The SF Standard's article

Mar 13, 2023

You have a priest in the Catholic church that molests kids. And then they move them around to another parish and they go, well, that was ten years ago. Let’s go ahead and put them in charge of Sunday school.

SF public defender Elizabeth Hilton, Department 24, February 7, 2023

Jonah Owen Lamb has published a series of recent articles where he has relied almost exclusively on career employees with the Public Defender’s Office as his sources. In one article, Lamb shared public defender Elizabeth Hilton’s spin that SFPD officers, who were briefly investigated along with every undercover officer in the city a decade ago, are comparable to priests that have been found guilty of committing crimes (see quote above.) Lamb’s resulting article was a biased endorsement of Hilton’s client’s fentanyl business.

Undercover officers buying from fentanyl sellers are rock solid cases

Hilton is representing Nicol Palma who was arrested three times in a 12-month period for selling fentanyl to undercover SFPD officers in the Tenderloin.

When undercover police officers purchase drugs from a seller, it is a very dangerous endeavor. But the tradeoff is that “buy/busts” provide the most airtight cases against fentanyl sellers. The drugs just don’t just surface out of midair-especially a kilo, it involves a secondary police officer retrieving marked money off the seller, and there are numerous supporting police officers that are eyewitnesses.

In Lamb’s article, he discusses the ineffectiveness of SFPD officers buying drugs from fentanyl sellers. Lamb wrote, “Lawyer John Burris (said) such tactics are a shell game. And the worst part? ‘They are targeting the wrong people you are taking for nickel and dime bags.”’ There is a 100% probability that Lamb did not share with Burris that over a kilo of drugs, including enough fentanyl to wipe out San Francisco, were confiscated in Palma’s arrests. But don’t let a kilo of facts get in the way of a nickel and dime bag story.

Considering the danger officers accept to eradicate the fentanyl epidemic, it is curious why Lamb’s article outed one of the SFPD buyers with a photograph. Fentanyl sellers operate in a constant fear that a new purchaser is a potential officer, a robber, or possibly there is an opportunity to rob the purchaser. One of the SFPD officers mentioned in Lamb’s article has been robbed at gunpoint trying to purchase narcotics. The photograph of the SFPD officer gives Lamb’s article the feel of him throwing an intentional wrench at SFPD officers’ attempts to deter the fentanyl trade- like a journalist including a photo of a CIA agent working in a foreign operation that the writer disagrees with.

Over the past two decades the three officers targeted by Hilton have made more felony arrests than anyone in SFPD. That along with the solidness of the case against Palma caused Hilton to choose to disparage the arresting officers. It’s analogous to being incapable of defending against your opponent’s leading scorer, so you revert to physically hurting him.

All SFPD officers are investigated during their career. I was investigated by the Department of Police Accountability for eating a Hershey’s candy bar in the doorway of a Tenderloin video store- I’m not kidding. In 2011, every undercover SFPD officer was investigated by the FBI and SFPD’s Internal Affairs. The impetus for the dual 2011 investigations came from Adachi’s need to take out the SFPD’s same leading scorers that Hilton is now rehashing in 2023. Adachi’s self-fulling playbook was to create a story that is investigated but found meritless, then use the scent of suspicion from the investigation to sell his false narrative. This is where Hilton makes her association equating SFPD officers that were merely investigated under Adachi, with priests that have been found guilty of molesting.

To denigrate the SFPD officers, Hilton introduced relatives of people arrested by SFPD for felony narcotics violations, while purposely withholding the arrestees from testifying. Court transcripts document one of Hilton’s witnesses had never filed a complaint against SFPD but was now coming forward 12 years later.

Per the court transcripts, Hilton’s other only witnesses, from over a dozen year ago, were a husband-and-wife team. The couple contacted Public Defender Jeff Adachi nine months after their son was arrested for a large amount of narcotics. The mother said, “I went to Adachi, you know, I don’t know if he’s the Chief of Police or something else.” The mother’s statement confirms what numerous attorneys in the SF District Attorney’s office have shared with me over the years. That the employees in the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office routinely call victims the DA’s are representing, claiming they are calling from “the SFPD”- pretending they share the same abbreviation as the San Francisco Police Department- which misleads the witnesses so the public defenders can obtain inside information and potentially dissuade them.

In court, the parents needed a translator. Yet, introduced in the court transcripts was that Adachi’s office had both the husband and wife sign a written declaration in English. That is no different than Brittney Griner signing a confession in Russian, “Я пытался убить Владимира Путина.” How could Griner know that she was signing a confession, “I tried to kill Vladimir Putin?”

Hilton’s case started to unravel when the assistant district attorney pointed out that the mother’s written statement contradicted her testimony in court that day. Essentially the mother was either lying in court, or she lied in the written statement prepared 12 years ago. Judge Bruce Chan[1] read through Hilton’s optics-trump-facts circus and the staleness of her clients’ memories and ruled there was probable cause that Palma had sold fentanyl to undercover officers. Of course, that dinky fact on Chan’s decision did not make Lamb’s article. My sources told me Lamb was only in court for Hilton’s cop bashing, and not for Chan’s ruling.

I am sure right now that the Public Defender’s Office is prepping Palma with their fresh new script I’m only in the US because I was trafficked here. Since Chan didn’t buy Hilton misdirect, the only option is for Palma to claim victimhood as her defense.

Hilton, religion, and the Ten Commandments

In the Palma court transcripts, Hilton said, “I would not make that as a request of other police officers that had less, that didn’t have the Brady jacket” that one of the officer’s has. “Brady status” is a list of officers that have been caught lying in court or in a police report, and renders their court testimony untrustworthy. Unfortunately, none of the officers Hilton referenced in the Palma trial are on the Brady list.[2] This was a direct lie by Hilton.

If the courts permit Hilton to associate innocent cops with guilty priests, then it is only fair we can relate her alleged affairs to Adachi’s alleged affairs?

In February 2019, Public Defender Adachi was engaged in an alleged affair with a young woman that resulted in a death- his death from the consumption of cocaine.

Similarly, for years, rumors swirled that Hilton’s alleged relationship with an SF sheriff, Ben Anatran, also resulted in death. During my time with SFPD, Hilton was thereafter pejoratively called the Black Widow.

Per an eyewitness, Anatran and his wife, Yvette, attended a December 1997 holiday party. Hilton entered the room and asked if she could speak with Yvette. The two exited the room for approximately 10 to 15 minutes. Yvette returned to the table and told her husband that it was time to leave. Anatran was never seen again. That very night, he went home, and a bullet passed through his head—an apparent suicide. We have to wonder what words of wisdom Hilton shared with Yvette.

Consider: first, whether Hilton and Anatran were merely coffee buddies or in an intimate relationship is impossible to confirm, and second, what activities two consulting adults partake in is none of our business. But we should be consistent and apply Hilton’s standard of proof in Department 24 to her personal life.

It appears Hilton struggles to distinguish the difference between a priest answering investigative questions and a priest being found guilty. If we apply Hilton’s logic that SFPD officers are automatically guilty because they have been investigated, then all the investigations into Adachi’s death makes him culpable, and any investigative questions Hilton had to answer regarding Anatran’s death makes her guilty. The important takeaway from this is to illustrate Hilton’s unstable and destructive approach to defending her clients and attacking the people that jilt her.

And for those of you keeping score at home, Hilton (allegedly) violated the Seventh,[3] Ninth,[4] and Tenth[5] Commandments.

There needs to be oversight over the Public Defender’s Office

It’s difficult enough to deter the fentanyl trade in SF without the SF Public Defender’s Office writing fiction, and Lamb running interference. Really, they aren’t seeking justice, but instead promoting that the broken windows theory should be replaced by the break windows theory.

San Francisco is swamped with toothless oversight boards. Yet if an officer eats a Hershey’s candy bar in a doorway, it’s investigated by an oversight board. Concurrently, public defenders are allowed to identify themselves as “S.F.P.D,” have witnesses sign statements in a foreign language, or lie about officers’ reputations with no accountability. Then the public defenders amplify their falsehoods in the San Francisco media’s echo chamber. San Francisco desperately needs an oversight board to monitor the public defender fraternity and to deter them from using the San Francisco media to propagandize their cases.

[1] Judge Chan, a former public defender, famously tore into the way DA Boudin was handling his prosecution cases. Boudin’s office claimed Judge Chan called to apologize. A convenient Boudin ploy, because a sitting judge can’t speak to the press to verify or deny a secret phone call.

[2] I have been shown an email from a public defender that worked temporarily in the District Attorney’s office that confirms there are no Brady violations.

[3] Seventh Commandment: Thou shall not commit adultery.

[4] Ninth Commandment: Thou shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

[5] Tenth Commandment: Thou shall not covet your neighbor’s spouse.