The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board has a low opinion of the power plays the upper ranks of county government have repeatedly employed to install insiders in high-profile jobs without seriously seeking or considering public input. This history led to our sharp criticism last summer of county supervisors’ decision to choose Chief Deputy District Attorney Summer Stephan as interim district attorney after Bonnie Dumanis announced plans to leave the full-time post with more than a year of her term unfilled. This gave a huge boost to Stephan’s already-planned 2018 run to be the next elected DA — in effect putting a thumb on the scale of democracy.

It is tempting to hold the supervisors’ act against Stephan. But in her interview with the editorial board, the veteran prosecutor said that she understood and acknowledged “appropriate” concerns about her appointment. “I didn’t need it and in fact I didn’t want it” to help her in her bid for office, she said. After getting what she took to be sincere, widespread encouragement from DA staffers and community leaders to take the interim job, she said she agreed. Given the independent, thoughtful way she’s run the DA’s office since her appointment, this explanation is satisfactory. It removes enough of the cloud created by the selection process for the editorial board to be comfortable with strongly endorsing Stephan, a Republican, for a full four-year term.

In nearly 30 years with the office, Stephan’s proudest accomplishment is her work as chief of the DA’s Sex Crimes and Human Trafficking Division, which has pioneered tactics to target traffickers and to rescue victims and help them salvage their lives. Stephan makes a strong case that her bipartisan support — including from Democratic San Diego City Attorney Mara Elliott — reflects the fact that she has been an agent of change, not a placid defender of the status quo. Stephan’s role in reducing the jailing of juveniles, in speeding up local police agencies’ testing of rape kits after succeeding Dumanis and in proactively negotiating down felony marijuana charges to misdemeanors after the passage of Proposition 64 buttresses this claim.

Her Democratic opponent, Deputy Public Defender Geneviéve Jones-Wright, was impressive in her own right in her interview with the editorial board. Jones-Wright made a powerful case for criminal justice reform — saying “we can’t overincarcerate our way out of problems” and describing how the bail system takes a wrecking ball to people’s lives. She spoke passionately and smartly about the need to have independent reviews of officer-involved shootings instead of a system that seems to reflexively accept all shootings as justified. And she made a provocative case that the District Attorney’s Office is in desperate need of an outsider to shake up an organization that has been complacent, especially on issues involving minority communities.


But despite repeated allegations, Jones-Wright has not made the case that a culture of corruption exists within the DA’s office and that Stephan is a central part of this culture. Of late, Jones-Wright has shown more interest in questionable attacks on Stephan — saying “the narrative” that Stephan is “a sex trafficking expert and champion for victims is false and based on fear mongering” — than in measured, pointed criticisms of how the DA’s office is run. Being an underdog against an opponent with broad establishment support, Jones-Wright may feel as if she has no choice. But her campaign does not inspire confidence in her management skills, and there are just enough questions about her judgment to wonder why she has not moved up the ranks during her 12 years in the Public Defender’s Office.

We hope Jones-Wright remains active in local debates over criminal justice, courts and police and helps ensure these issues receive more attention for years to come. But because we believe Stephan has significantly more potential to be an aggressive, effective problem-solver, she gets our endorsement.

The San Diego County District Attorney’s race is between a public defender and the current interim district attorney. The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board interviewed both candidates for more than an hour. Here are those interviews, lightly edited.

Geneviéve Jones-Wright: Read the interview | Listen to the interview


Summer Stephan: Read the interview | Listen to the interview

Read and listen to all of our candidate interviews & questionnaires.

Related: How The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board will make its 2018 election endorsements

You will find all of our endorsements here.


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