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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   20492 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 2025

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https://abc7news.com/post/people-charged-felonies-san-francisco-could-released-due-lack-public-defenders/18054704/

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- The San Francisco Public Defender's office has warned for months that it doesn't have the staffing necessary to deal with its increasing caseload.

There's a lot going on in this article. The San Francisco public defender's office is claiming that individuals must be released from incarceration if the office does not receive more funding to secure additional manpower. They also claim that this is due to frivolous cases being brought up by the DA, saying that their caseload has incr by 60% since 2021.

The DA claims that it is a cynical attempt to hold the city for ransom to secure more funding for the Public Defender's office.

It's interesting to me that the Public Defender's office chose 2021 as its metric, as I believe that represented the low-water mark of law enforcement activity in the US over the last decade.

Does anyone in the area have more context on this? It appears to be a very specific kind of infighting that seems very alien to me.

The DA claims that it is a cynical attempt to hold the city for ransom to secure more funding for the Public Defender's office.

This seems likely, considering the literal demand is ‘more funding’.

I mean, certainly there exists some amount of funding at which you've got to say "you are not giving us enough funding to have enough public defenders actually live in the Bay Area to deal with this caseload; if you don't give us more, you're not fulfilling your constitutional duties because N lawyers cannot actually defend 300N cases at a time".

Whether SF's caseload is actually at that point, I have no idea.

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