You would be hard pressed to find more divergent opponents on the San Diego County June ballot than in the race for district attorney.

One is the county’s prosecutor: the insider, establishment candidate with nearly three decades of experience who has risen through the ranks to the top of her profession, making changes to the DA’s office along the way.

The other is a public defender: the outsider with more than a decade on the job who has become part of a national movement to elect district attorneys who believe the U.S. criminal justice system is stacked against minorities and the underprivileged and must be overhauled.

Both claim the mantle of reformer in vastly different ways.


District Attorney Summer Stephan is viewed by many as the heir apparent to former DA Bonnie Dumanis and the movers and shakers in town would like to make that a certainty.

Deputy Public Defender Geneviéve Jones-Wright is the choice not only of San Diego progressives but criminal justice reform advocates Shaun King and possibly billionaire George Soros.

Both appear whip-smart with campaign styles as different as their backgrounds. Jones-Wright is fiery and goes for the roundhouse political haymaker; Stephan is low-key and delivers stinging jabs to potentially set up a knockout punch.

“We need change. It’s that simple,” said Jones-Wright, a San Diego native who started off as a neighborhood pro bono attorney. “We need change and we’re not going to get it under the status quo.”


“If you define reformer in a non-political sense. . . then I would be the ultimate reformer,” Stephan said. “I’m constantly the one driving change in the office.”

Both spoke during lengthy interviews with the editorial board and reporters at the Union-Tribune last week.

Jones-Wright said she would create a DA-appointed panel to review shootings by police officers that would nevertheless remain independent of the DA’s office. She said that between 2005 and 2015 there were 155 officer-involved shootings and all were determined to be justified by the District Attorney’s Office. She said the odds of that are very long and maintains a new process is needed.

“We have to get away from the district attorney being a rubber stamp,” she said, contending the DA’s office is too close with police agencies.


She believes the state’s cash-bail system borders on criminal — and a California appeals court in January suggested the system is unconstitutional because defendants too poor to afford bail remain in jail while those with means get out quickly.

Jones-Wright supports bail reform legislation in Sacramento, SB 10, that would not allow people to be held because of their inability to pay and instead base the bail decision on severity of the crime, flight risk and economic means. A lot of people would be let out on their own recognizance, or required to wear ankle bracelets.

Jones-Wright, who sits on the city’s Commission on Gang Prevention and Intervention, says local authorities can move more quickly to make bail changes on their own.

She would act to keep low-level, non-violent offenders out of jail through diversion programs and would avoid charging for “quality of life” crimes such as vagrancy, disorderly conduct and loitering.


She’s an adamant opponent of the death penalty and indicated she would not seek it, but added that she would have a balanced process to assess potential death penalty-eligible cases.

But she called the death penalty “discriminatory, costly and ineffective.”

“There’s just so many reasons the death penalty doesn’t work,” she said, pointing to cases where mistakes were discovered in convictions of people on death row.

Jones-Wright objected to the way the District Attorney’s Office is run, contending that defendants are routinely overcharged.


“I see that day in and day out . . . I see it as a public defender,” she said.

She takes a harsh view of how Stephan was appointed to replace Bonnie Dumanis, who resigned last year to run for county supervisor.

“To me that smells, and that smells of corruption,” she said.

She further said Stephan, who was Dumanis’ top lieutenant, should investigate whether Dumanis had a greater role than publicly revealed in the illegal campaign financing scheme of Mexican businessman José Susumo Azano Matsura. He was convicted on dozens of federal counts related to his illegal effort to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to benefit San Diego candidates, including Dumanis when she ran for mayor in 2012.


“I think that is the obligation of the district attorney to look into that,” she said.

Jones-Wright would not commit to investigating Dumanis if elected, but added, “I would do my job as district attorney.”

Stephan already was a candidate for DA when Dumanis stepped down and said she really didn’t want the appointment. She further said she actually didn’t think it would benefit her campaign. Stephan ultimately applied, she said, at the urging of the deputy district attorneys, whom she felt she could not let down.

“I didn’t need it. I didn’t want it,” she said. “...I didn’t feel I had a choice.”


She dismissed the notion of investigating Dumanis. “It’s been a federal investigation for five years,” she said.

She also notes that she’s worked for three district attorneys and has been promoted by all of them.

Stephan does not concede the mantle of reformer. She pioneered the DA’s sex crimes and human trafficking division and has been nationally recognized for her work in that area.

She also helped establish diversion programs aimed at keeping veterans with substance abuse, homeless and people who commit low-level, non-violent crimes out of jail. The goal is non-conviction for these people, not convictions that are expunged.


“What people complain about is when people make stupid mistakes and their life is derailed,” Stephan said.

She said the DA’s office already is at work on a risk-based bail system, ahead of what’s happening in Sacramento. Jones-Wright said Stephan only started talking about bail reform after she did.

In data from October, 24 percent of the county jail population had not yet had their case determined by the court, meaning the overwhelming majority incarcerated had been convicted, according to the District Attorney’s Office.

Stephan said she is further contemplating the creation of an officer-involved shooting task force to bring a “second set of eyes” to those investigations.


“All of these things I’m examining as the new DA,” she said.

Stephan wouldn’t give her personal view on the death penalty, but said making that determination is difficult, and rare, but it is the law.

She points to her 15 years of management experience, and contends Jones-Wright has none. She suggested a “Kardashian effect” was in play, questioning whether Jones-Wright had the accomplishments to match her rising profile as a DA candidate.

“I have internal credibility and external credibility to make the change,” she added.


Jones-Wright said she would bring to the job “a perspective that would be balanced.” Stephan suggested Jones-Wright would tilt things too far in one direction.

“We can’t have a system where you have two public defenders,” she said.

Stephan added the DA’s office “can’t be an experiment. People’s lives depend on it.”

These are indeed two very different candidates. But we’ve learned they have at least one common trait: For first-time candidates, they know how to take a pretty good swing.


Tweet of the Week

Goes to Kristina Davis‏ (@kristinadavis), staff writer for the Union-Tribune.

“Best subject line for a press release in my inbox today: ‘Nudists Smile from Cheek to Cheek During May: National Smile Month’”