SF Public Defender Fined $26,000 for Refusing Overloaded Office's New Cases

Mano Raju is the only elected public defender in California. On Tuesday, outside San Francisco Superior Court, he stood before a crowd of supporters and declared that a judge's order was illegal — then walked inside to receive a $26,000 fine.

San Francisco Superior Court Judge Harry Dorfman imposed the fine on Raju — $1,000 for each person charged by the district attorney that Raju's office had refused to represent in court. In January, Dorfman had ordered the public defender's office to stop turning down cases, but Raju continued, and at a hearing on March 10, Dorfman found him in contempt of court. On Tuesday, Dorfman fined him $1,000 for each of the initial 26 cases rejected since that order and set another hearing in April to add more fines.

Raju began declining to represent some defendants in new felony and misdemeanor cases last May, citing a crushing workload driven by increased prosecutions and insufficient staffing. His attorneys average 60 felony cases and 135 misdemeanor cases at a time, well above the up to 40 felony and 80 misdemeanor cases recommended in a 2025 study by the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center at Southern Methodist University. The fastest solution, Raju said, would be to fund the public defender's office, which he said needs 36 more attorneys.

"Every member of my team could cut their workload in half, and they would still have more than a full-time job," Raju told the Associated Press. He told the judge directly that the strain is not just administrative: "People and their families get hurt when we can't provide the representation we should and our staff suffers the residual trauma."

Despite the contempt finding, Raju has not backed down. "Our view is that his order is an illegal order," he said outside the courthouse. "So one day a week, we have declined to take some of the cases." He said he plans to appeal and keep declining some new cases.

District Attorney Brooke Jenkins has ramped up prosecutions, filing 8,000 felony and misdemeanor cases last year, compared to about 5,600 filed in 2021. Raju wants money for more attorneys or for the court to reject some of the cases brought by Jenkins. Jenkins countered sharply: "Their objective is to disrupt the system, it's to cause chaos, it is to bottleneck the courthouse."

The DA's office has said that the public defender's office is making a political choice in its refusal to take cases. Chief Deputy District Attorney Ana Gonzalez said that when caseloads have skyrocketed in the past, no such emergency was declared, and that the number of new felony cases has been flat for four years.

Judge Dorfman said in court Tuesday that while he found Raju had acted in good faith before the court, "that does not mean that I'm going to retreat or stay a court order." "I concluded that he has available lawyers," Dorfman told the court.

Public defenders and staff from across California packed into the courtroom in support of Raju. Active cases in San Francisco have risen 65 percent since 2019, according to the public defender's office. The office framed its position in constitutional terms, stating that having excessive caseloads creates a conflict of interest for existing clients and that "declaring ourselves unavailable in a limited number of new cases remains necessary to meet our constitutional obligations until we become fully staffed and fairly funded."

Raju noted that the District Attorney's office has $39 million more than the Public Defender's office in San Francisco. The public defender's office had been declining misdemeanor cases one or two days a week and felony cases one day a week, and for some time the San Francisco Bar Association tried to fill the gap by representing those the office declined, but in October, Bar's private defense attorneys said they too had reached capacity.

Judge Dorfman gave the public defender's office until April 10 to pay the sanctions. With another hearing set for April to potentially add more fines, and Raju pledging both an appeal and continued refusals, the standoff between San Francisco's top defense attorney and its courts shows no sign of resolution.