THE CHRON INDICTS THE D.A.

THE SAN FRANCISCO Chronicle has been critical of Terence Hallinan for
years, critical of his record as a progressive supervisor, critical of his
campaign for district attorney, and critical of almost every major move
he's made in that office. Now the Chron has leveled its most serious
offensive yet a front-page story that, in essence, accuses Hallinan of
letting huge numbers of violent criminals go free. The Chron story charged
that Hallinan has the worst rate of felony convictions of any district
attorney in California.

The concept of thousands of criminals who ought to be in jail running
around the streets of San Francisco terrorizing the population is out of
sync with reality: crime rates particularly violent crimes rates are
dropping, rather dramatically, in the city. Murders, for example, are down
to the lowest rate since the 1960s. That may be more of a reflection on the
economy than on Hallinan's leadership as the city's "top cop," but as A.
Clay Thompson reports, there's a lot more to the story than what appeared
in the Chron.

San Francisco, for example, is the only county in the state in which every
single felony arrest case is presented to the D.A. for prosecution. In
every other county, local police pre-screen the cases and drop the charges
in the ones that lack credible evidence. In Alameda, for example, some
2,000 of the 16,000 felony arrests were dropped by police before the D.A.
ever saw them. So naturally, Hallinan is going to dismiss more cases than
other D.A.s. And what's more, San Francisco has one of the most
pro-defendant jury pools in the state.

Further, Hallinan has done far more than his predecessors to move criminal
cases out of the criminal courts and find ways to resolve them that don't
involve sending people to prison. For example, a significant number of the
felony cases he's been handed as D.A. have been diverted into drug courts
and mentoring programs, in which first offenders are given the chance to
enroll in college instead of going to jail. The program has been a
tremendous success but every drug offender who goes through it counts as a
case that didn't end in a criminal conviction, and thus hurts Hallinan's
"conviction rate."

Hallinan is by no means perfect, and there are plenty of legitimate reasons
to criticize him. We still take issue with his refusal to take a firm stand
against death-penalty prosecutions. He's still, unfortunately, prosecuting
people for selling fairly small amounts of marijuana. And he hasn't done a
good job of presenting his side of this story.

But the Chron's attempt to blame him for letting too many violent criminals
go free is missing the point. The D.A.'s race this fall ought to be about
facts accurate facts and the debate should focus around how best to promote
progressive criminal justice policies in San Francisco, not scaremongering
and cheap shots.

P.S. It's particularly ironic that the San Francisco Chronicle is accusing
a liberal D.A. of being soft on crime. The paper has ignored big criminal
scandals like the Raker Act all these years. In fact, the Chron was itself
a federal lawbreaker for five years: when it first formed a JOA with the
Examiner in 1965. Now the papers are flouting antitrust law again. We
encourage Hallinan, and state attorney general Bill Lockyer, to fully
investigate the pending Chron-Ex merger and consider prosecuting the
publishers for a real, serious crime: the assassination of a daily newspaper.