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Adachi relishes a challenge. In that early felony case, he didn't bother trying to persuade his client to plead guilty. He sat in the holding cell with the defendant and prepared for trial. "It actually worked for me," Adachi says, "because I was so incensed that I worked the heck out of that case and we got an acquittal."
Defying the assembly-line nature of the courts system is both Adachi's mission and signature. "How do you try a case where your client was identified by four eyewitnesses, they have a video tape confession showing your client demonstrating how something was done, and [they have] physical evidence? Most lawyers couldn't even imagine getting up in front of a jury and trying those cases, and we try those cases all the time," he says.
Indeed, Adachi's penchant for taking cases to court became a key issue in his first campaign for public defender in 2002. In the weeks leading up to the election, Adachi found himself having to defend himself to the San Francisco Chronicle as not "some kind of Russian roulette trial lawyer" while his opponent, Kimiko Burton, boasted that under her leadership, the office was "much more circumspect about the cases going to trial."
Adachi had started working for the public defender in 1986 as a misdemeanor attorney, struggling to provide effective representation to the 280 clients he'd be assigned at a time. He tried 28 jury trials in his first 18 months and, eventually, learned how to win. He moved up to felonies after a few years, and was tapped by Jeff Brown, then the head of the office, for the role of chief attorney (a position responsible for the management of the office's attorneys) in 1998. It was generally assumed that he would succeed Brown in the top job.
But when Brown left office in 2001 — before the end of his term — to take a seat on the California Public Utilities Commission, then-Mayor Willie Brown appointed Kimiko Burton, the daughter of California Democratic Party powerhouse John Burton (he was president of the state Senate at the time), to fill the job until the election. Burton fired Adachi on her first day. (Brown, explaining his seemingly nepotistic choice to the Los Angeles Times in 2002, invoked, well, nepotism: "I don't know Jeff Adachi from Adam. I have known Kimiko Burton since her birth. Why, in the name of heaven, if I have an opportunity to name someone, would I name someone I don't know?")
Adachi entered private practice and began his campaign against the so-called "Willie Brown-John Burton machine." John Burton kicked his political operation into high gear for his daughter's campaign, bringing in money and endorsements from Sacramento and Washington D.C. In just one example of the heavy-handed nature of the Burton machine, the late Ted Gullicksen of the San Francisco Tenants Union told the San Francisco Bay Guardian that he had been warned an endorsement for Adachi would mean less support for tenant's rights from John Burton in Sacramento. But despite Kimiko Burton raising four times as much campaign money as Adachi, the challenger won by a significant margin.
When Adachi took leadership of the Public Defender's Office, the budget was just $13 million a year, and the entire staff of attorneys shared one paralegal. Under his leadership the budget has more than doubled — to almost $30 million a year — and Adachi boasts that he offers San Francisco's poor "the best representation money can't buy." In addition to a staff of paralegals, the office also now employs investigators and social workers. The social workers ensure clients get enrolled in drug treatment programs and don't violate their probation.
A special team focuses exclusively on helping people clear past convictions from their records, a process allowed for by state law that was nevertheless rarely taken advantage of until Adachi started the Clean Slate Program in 1998. The office is able to expunge records for about 2,000 people a year, making it easier for them to find employment and housing.
It's all part of what Adachi calls "holistic representation." As an office charged with a constitutional mandate to represent the poor in what Adachi calls "a society that's addicted to charging people with crimes and incarcerating them," he has a vested interest in the "social outcome" of his clients. "The worst thing in the world if you're a public defender," he says, " is to see your client back in jail again."
Adachi's expansive view of what it means to be the elected public defender has touched off two major shakeups in San Francisco politics. The first was a somewhat hubristic campaign for pension reform that began in 2010. Following a study by San Francisco's civil grand jury on the steep costs of the city's public employee pension fund, Adachi threw himself into a campaign for pension reform, touching off a two-year battle between himself and the city's labor unions. At the time, the city's budget and employees were struggling under the effects of the Great Recession. Adachi wanted public employees to contribute more to their pension and health insurance costs, both to free up money for other city services and to ensure the long-term health of the underfunded benefits programs.
"We had police officers who were retiring with a $250,000 a year pension, at the same time they were closing summer school for kids because they didn't have enough money in supplemental funds in the city budget to help," Adachi says. "I just saw a glaring contradiction in terms of what we were trying to do as public servants and the need to feed the pension and healthcare costs."
The unions saw the crusade as an all-out assault on workers who were already struggling with layoffs and contract givebacks thanks to the poor economy. Adachi was compared to Scott Walker, Wisconsin's union-busting governor, and worse. (Crossing a picket line at a nonunion hotel to fundraise for the campaign made matters even worse.) Gary Delagnes of the Police Officers Association called him a "fat-cat front man," writing: "Jeff Adachi is a hypocrite. He has a mansion in St. Francis Woods, owns a luxury Mercedes, salary of $196,000, funded buy [sic] a billionaire venture capitalist. Oh, and by the way, has never paid a dime into his own pension!" Five years later, many union members and staff still react with revulsion and anger to his name.
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