FIVE CANDIDATES VIE FOR TOP PROSECUTOR’S JOB
Erik Cummins S 22 FALL 2011
an Francisco’s justice system faces tremendous challenges in the coming years, as court budgets have been slashed, thousands of convicted criminals will return to local municipalities as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s realignment of the state prison system, and the overall economy remains shaky at best. This year, five candidates want to bring their visions to the San Francisco district attorney’s office to solve those problems and more. Here, we profile the candidates and their views and leave it to our members to decide in BASF’s plebiscite and the November 8, 2011, municipal election who best would lead as San Francisco’s top prosecutor.
Sharmin Bock has been an as- sistant district attorney in the Ala- meda County district attorney’s office for twenty-two years. She boasts a 95 percent conviction rate for cases brought to trial and tried the first child sex-trafficking cases under California’s new hu- man trafficking law in 2006. She also created the county’s Human Exploitation and Trafficking Unit and cowrote AB 90 to align state and federal trafficking laws.
Born in Iran and raised in San Francisco, Bock earned her law degree at Georgetown University Law Center in 1988. She spent summers at major San Francisco firms and the Environmental Enforcement Section of the U.S. Department of Justice. After law school, she clerked with U.S. District Court Judge D. Lowell Jensen. Instead of accepting a job at a big law firm, she joined the Alameda County district attorney’s office.
The position of San Francisco district attorney “is not a management job,” she said. “This is not a police job. It’s a job for a seasoned, experienced prosecutor. At the end of the day, it’s experience that informs the decision-making process. If [a prosecutor asks], ‘Do I charge this?’ you don’t want to say, ‘Let me ask somebody and get back to you.’”
If elected, Bock would try cases when her schedule permit- ted it. “You want to keep your finger on the pulse,” she said.
Bock opposes the death penalty and is leading efforts to ban it. In fact, she would take the money saved by not pursuing death penalty cases and use it for unsolved mur- der and rape cases.
San Francisco’s 2010 Proposition L, dubbed “sit-lie,” which banned sitting or lying on sidewalks, she argued, has not worked and has not provided long-term solutions. She also disagrees with sending drug offenders to prison. “They belong in a diversion program,” she said. “You need to look at the total person. We are misusing resources to even consider incarcerating people for drug convictions.”
San Francisco’s backlog of DNA testing needs to be addressed, and she wants to import her ideas on child sex trafficking to San Francisco.
As for prison realignment, she asked, “How can we turn this into a win-win situation and make reentry successful? We have to start before people arrive and work with the California Reentry Institute to make sure we have housing and jobs in place.”
Bock concluded, “San Francisco deserves a district attor- ney with the right kind of experience and a progressive veteran prosecutor.”
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