DEFENDING THE D.A.

How The Chronicle Doctored The Numbers To Screw Terence Hallinan

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco is saddled with the
worst district attorney in the state at least until the November elections.
On Sept. 2, the paper led with a lengthy "special report" excoriating
prosecutor Terence Hallinan for what the Chronicle considers a paltry
conviction rate.

"Hallinan ranks dead last among California's 58 county prosecutors, winning
convictions in less than a third of the criminal cases lodged with his
office last year," Chron staffer Bill Wallace wrote.

The D.A. won convictions in a mere 32.5 percent of the felonies brought to
his office during 1998, Wallace reports. More disturbingly, he writes,
Hallinan convicted only 27.5 percent of the violent felons nabbed by police
last year. According to the story, Hallinan's conviction rate is lower than
that of his predecessor, Arlo Smith, and his peers around the state; the
state average is 74 percent.

The Chronicle story suggests that hundreds of hardened criminals are going
unpunished on Hallinan's watch. In fact, the paper has vastly inflated the
number of cases that fall through the D.A.'s net folding together cases
Hallinan legitimately dropped, cases he referred to the state Department of
Corrections, cases he handled with progressive alternatives to prosecution,
and cases he lost. Ken Conner, Wallace's editor at the Chronicle, stood by
the story. "The conviction rate is exactly what it is," Conner told us.
"Hallinan has had every opportunity to explain it to us and the public. The
facts are the facts; no one has disputed the facts."

He pointed out that the paper mentioned Hallinan's diversion programs and
the lack of arrest screening done by the police.

In a press conference last week and interviews with the Bay Guardian,
Hallinan said the Chron got the story dead wrong. "A success here is a
failure to the Chron," he told us. "The reality is that San Francisco is
doing a terrific job of prosecuting violent crime."

Factors not taken into account Though Wallace based his story on statistics
from the state Department of Justice and a review of 100 violent felony
cases, a close look suggests that he didn't take several important factors
into account.

The first is the unusual relationship between San Francisco's police
department and the D.A.'s office. In most counties, police decide whether
to pass on questionable cases to the prosecutor or throw them out. If
there's little evidence against a suspect, the cops will throw out the case
before it gets to the D.A. Here, though, the police pass on virtually all
their arrests to Hallinan, whose office decides which ones to immediately
throw out.

In 1998, for instance, Contra Costa police threw out 1,442 cases; San Diego
cops chucked 3,872. San Francisco police, on the other hand, passed all but
seven of 16,614 arrests on to Hallinan for screening.

Compare Hallinan's record with that of neighboring Alameda County. Last
year Alameda police dropped charges against 2,003 of 15,840 arrestees. If
you compare the results of felony arrests in the two counties (rather than
the cases passed on to the D.A.), the numbers look strikingly similar: 40
percent of people arrested for felonies in Alameda were charged with
felonies; 34 percent of felony arrests in San Francisco went to court as
felonies. And of the 1,698 violent felony cases Hallinan took to trial, he
racked up a 62 percent conviction rate higher than Alameda and in the
middle of the pack statewide.

Other tactics The Chronicle's analysis also fails to take into account some
tactics Hallinan's office uses to penalize criminals. San Francisco moved
to revoke probation essentially sending suspects back to jail in 1,317
cases, more than twice as many as Alameda. And according to Hallinan
staffers, the city sent 700 suspects who had been paroled for state
offenses back to the state prison parole system.

Rather than being tried in county court, their cases were heard by the
parole board and some wound up back in the state pen. But to the Chronicle,
those cases count against Hallinan as felonies in which he didn't obtain a
conviction. "We use motions to revoke probation a lot, and that should be
added into our stats," deputy D.A. Paul Cummins told us. "It's not like we
released all these guys." Cummins said the tactic often makes more sense
than an expensive and arduous jury trial.

The Chronicle also omits one of Hallinan's most notable accomplishments his
willingness to look beyond jail-'em-all impulses to more appropriate and
effective solutions to crime and violent behavior. San Francisco
prosecutors say they sent around 1,000 cases to community courts and
mediation services last year outcomes that aren't included in California
Department of Justice figures and weren't reported by Wallace.

San Francisco's D.A. is deluged with drug cases some 7,790 felonies last
year. Alameda, a far larger county, saw 6,296 in the same time. These make
up more than 70 percent of the felonies Hallinan sees, and as an outspoken
critic of the war on drugs, he dismisses many and prosecutes others as
misdemeanors. Others go to diversion, drug court, and other alternatives.
Hallinan's drug court requires petty drug users to enroll in school. "We
could put them all in prison; I want to put 'em in college instead," the
D.A. says. To the Chronicle, they're all cases Hallinan failed to
prosecute. Increase in police staffing Another factor that goes unmentioned
by the Chron is San Francisco's increase in police staffing over the past
half decade. San Francisco had 2,900 law-enforcement officers in 1994; by
1998 that number was up to 4,258.

Does that increase represent more thugs out on the streets murdering,
raping, and pillaging? Not likely. Murders in San Francisco have dropped
from 107 in 1993 to 34 last year; violent offenses overall are down 28
percent since 1994. San Francisco is the safest big city in California. So
it's more likely that the burgeoning police force is making a growing
number of questionable arrests.

Wallace gives some snapshots of a prosecutor's office apparently asleep at
the wheel. He cites the case of Edward and Heidi Farebrother, who beat a
man to death for $1,500 in jewelry. The duo pleaded guilty to voluntary
manslaughter, robbery, and burglary; he got 14 years and eight months in
the state pen, she 13 years and eight months. The two could've been hit
with the death penalty or a life sentence without the possibility of parole
for killing someone while robbing him. That the Farebrothers got hit with
more than a decade of hard time is seen as failure by Wallace. But Hallinan
told us the case wasn't exactly open-and-shut: there was no material proof
that the duo robbed the victim.

In the case of Dmitri Braud, a car thief and repeat offender mentioned in
the article, there were several road blocks to the man's conviction,
Hallinan told us: notably that the woman who had her car stolen couldn't
pick Braud out of a lineup or identify him in the courtroom.

"The headline could have been, 'S.F. shows dramatic drop in crime,' " said
Dan Macallair of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice at Hallinan's
press conference last week. "Crime rates have fallen faster here than
anywhere else in the country."

P.S. Hallinan told us he had presented the Chronicle with all this
information and that the story still came out misleading. Although the
story did mention many of the problems with Wallace's data, the story's
lead, headline, and main paragraph still drew the wrong conclusions.