Jeff Adachi, the San Francisco public defender who died at 59, spent his career fighting for the poor and against abuses

Jeff Adachi’s courtroom was never confined to just San Francisco’s Hall of Justice.

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Adachi had served as the city’s elected public defender since 2002, overseeing the office which provides legal aid to those who cannot afford it – but he believed that his duty was to more than his office’s clients. He released surveillance video of San Francisco police officers accused of stealing and conducting illegal searches from rooms in residential hotels. He publicized allegations that San Francisco sheriff deputies forced inmates to fight for their entertainment. He called for the then state attorney general, Kamala Harris, to investigate city officers who exchanged in racist and bigoted text messages – and then blasted her for inaction against that same police department over the fatal shootings of people of color.

Simply put, the public defender saw himself as the defender of the public.

“A truly, high-functioning public defender’s office is one in which the public defender serves the role of guarding against government abuses,” Adachi once said. “Who else is going to hold errant police or prosecutors or judges accountable?”

Adachi died last Friday, at the age of 59, having spent much of his life reimagining the role of an office that is too often overlooked and underfunded in this country’s criminal justice system.

A poor person should have the same right to a lawyer as a rich person Jeff Adachi

He leaves behind a legacy of “guarding against government abuses”. He leaves behind a robust public defender’s office whose budget he tripled in the almost 17 years he oversaw it. He also leaves behind a dream for more – and, he would have argued, a need for more.

In June, I sat down for an in-depth conversation with Adachi. Every local San Francisco journalist has hours of recorded interviews with Adachi – his critics used to call him a “media whore”, always quick to call a press conference – but he knew that when it came to righting wrongs within the criminal justice system, he had to convince more than just a jury of 12. “When you need to shine a light on things that need to be exposed, you need to work with the media,” he told me.

But this interview was essentially a chance to chat with a wartime general during a period of relative peace. And I got to learn how far Jeff Adachi’s courtroom truly stretched.

“A poor person should have the same right to a lawyer as a rich person,” he said. “But I’ve talked to public defender offices in South Carolina where the attorneys have 500 felony cases apiece. How do they even meet with the clients?

“They know there’s something better out there. I get from a lot of people, ‘San Francisco, you’re in a different world.’ But when it comes to equal justice and having an empowered public defender’s office, why? Why isn’t this a basic government function?”

“Public defenders,” Adachi said, “we haven’t made the case for ourselves yet.”

From grassroots activism to public office

Adachi’s path to public defense was laid out in his DNA. He was born into a history of injustice – both his Japanese-American parents had been interned along with his grandparents during the second world war – but it wasn’t until he was in college that he began to fight.

He grew up the son of an auto mechanic and lab technician in Sacramento, attending community college before transferring to UC Berkeley. It was here that he learned of Chol Soo Lee, a Korean immigrant wrongly convicted of murder, and here that he learned how to organize, how to rally, and how to get results.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jeff Adachi, San Francisco’s elected public defender, in 2018. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images

In this case, it was through the law – Adachi volunteered with the Chol Soo Lee Defense Committee, and eventually saw him acquitted in a new trial. “I got introduced to the law through being a grassroots organizer,” he told me. He would later use this experience to reach where the law could not.

In 1987, Adachi joined the San Francisco public defender’s office, which at the time was not much different from the understaffed and underfunded offices he sought to help before his death.

“Going into the misdemeanor unit, we had caseloads of up to about 300 cases at any given time,” he said. He described a typical day: arriving in the morning to a caseload of 50 clients before spending the afternoon in trial, only to find that when he came back to the office “there would be 15 to 20 fresh files” on new jailed clients needing help.

“You’d have to go to the jail to see them and you’d be there until 10 or 11 at night,” he explained, “and then you’d come back and get ready for the next day. This was my first white-collar job that I ever had and I had never worked that hard.”

Jeff showed us what public defense should be in America Ernie Lewis, National Association for Public Defense



It was the sort of trial by fire that leaves most young attorneys burnt out and disillusioned. But in Adachi’s case, it gave him the fuel that drove him through the rest of his career. He began talking about racial disparities and inequity within the criminal justice system years before Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement took hold. He pushed for social work programs beyond just representation in a courtroom.

And when he was elected to take charge of the office in 2002, he knew what needed to change. He believed in serving the people – the underserved and underrepresented – and he believed they deserved the same quality of representation that somebody who could afford an attorney in private practice would receive.

In his years of advocacy for his office, he was able to build a “holistic representation model”, with social workers and youth advocates to assist his clients from the moment they enter the criminal justice system until the moment they leave to hopefully never return again. He started the Clean State Program to help people expunge criminal records when he was chief attorney, but it has since grown from “a cardboard box that would go around from lawyer to lawyer” to a dedicated staff of five who clear up to 2,000 records a year.

‘Who will do it if we don’t?’

“Fearless” is the word used most often when describing Adachi, but Adachi was cognizant of the fact that one of the reasons why he could be so fearless was because he was independently elected, not appointed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jeff Adachi speaks during a demonstration in front of the San Francisco Hall of Justice in 2014. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Few public defenders nationwide have the level of independence that Adachi had, said Ernie Lewis, the executive director of the National Association for Public Defense. But still Adachi traveled around the country to train public defenders in places with little to no funding on how to fight at full strength, whether it be working with the media or understanding the racial implications behind jury selection.

More than anything, Lewis said, he led by example. In 2015, one of his deputy attorneys, Jami Tillotson, was handcuffed and detained by a San Francisco police officer when she stood up for her client outside of court. That Adachi had empowered his attorneys to feel they could fight for their clients to such an extent, and then have her back and rally the “entire national community behind her”, showed the kind of office he ran and the type of leader he was. “It’s a small story but it was a really significant inspirational moment,” Lewis said.

“A lot of us public defender leaders who are in very difficult places to lead took inspiration from what Jeff was able to do,” he said. “We wished we could do similarly, and he showed us how we could do that.”

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At the end of the interview, Adachi told me that he was optimistic for the future of public defense – that he truly believed it was possible to see the change he envisioned, a country in which a person could receive the same quality of representation as a rich person. “I hope to be there for the start of it,” he said – a harmless statement that becomes heartbreaking after a sudden death.

But Lewis felt it more fitting than sad. Because Adachi “absolutely was there for the start of it”. In a lot of ways, he was the start of it.

“Jeff had the model. He ran one of the best, if not the best, offices in the country,” Lewis said. “Jeff showed that if you wanted to represent people fairly, that this is the kind of structure you need, the kind of independence you need, the kind of caseload you need, and he held his head high on that.

“Jeff showed us what public defense should be in America. Now it’s up to every leader in America to look at what he did and try to emulate it.”