Chesa Boudin

Chesa Boudin

: Photo from Wikimedia Commons / Author of Photo: SFGovTV

Overview

* Son of former Weather Underground terrorists Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert
* Claims that the American criminal-justice system is thoroughly racist
* Was elected District Attorney of San Francisco in 2019
* Says he is “proud” to identify openly as a socialist


Chesa Boudin was born in New York City on August 21, 1980. His parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, had been members of the Weather Underground terrorist organization in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Chesa’s great-great-uncle, Louis Boudin, was a Marxist theoretician; his grandfather, Leonard Boudin, was a prominent radical attorney who represented controversial clients such as Fidel Castro, Joan Baez, and Paul Robeson; and his maternal great-uncle was the journalist I.F. Stone. Chesa’s name was derived, as a form of honor, from the name of the infamous Black Liberation Army member Joanne Chesimard, later known as Assata Shakur, the patron saint of Black Lives Matter.

As The American Spectator notes: “Boudin’s parents took part in dozens of bombings with their white Weatherman terrorist group in its declared war on the United States from 1970 to 1975. These were the folks who bastardized the cry of ‘peace now’ in the Vietnam anti-war movement into ‘piece now!’ (Piece was slang for a gun.) Their war’s avowed purpose was to aid black revolutionaries in creating a communist government. From 1980 to 1981 Boudin’s parents aided the Black Liberation Army as it carried out a string of ‘expropriations,’ meaning armed robberies.”

On October 20, 1981, when Chesa Boudin was 14 months old, his parents left him with a babysitter and went out to serve as getaway-truck drivers in the infamous Brink’s armored-car robbery in Nanuet, New York — an event that was organized by the Black Liberation Army and resulted in the deaths of two police officers and a security guard. When both of the boy’s parents were subsequently sentenced to lengthy prison terms for their roles in the Brink’s heist, they entrusted their friends Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn – who also were former members of the Weather Underground – to raise their son. Chesa Boudin has described Ayers and Dohrn as people who “have spent their entire lives fighting for social justice.” He likewise lauds his biological mother for having “taught bilingual parenting classes,” done “a lot of work around literacy,” and helped start “a peer education group around AIDS” during her 20+ years in prison.[1]

Ayers and Dohrn tried to shield young Chesa Boudin from learning too much about the crimes his parents had committed. “When I was little,” Boudin recalled in August 2021, “they would try to describe the robbery using Robin Hood as an analogy. They would emphasize that they weren’t trying to keep the money for themselves. They were trying to take money from a bank, which had a lot, and give it to communities that didn’t have any and that nobody was supposed to get hurt. But people did get hurt, and they were being punished as a result.”

In 2003 Chesa Boudin received a Rhodes Scholarship to attend St. Antony’s College at Oxford, where he went on to earn two master’s degrees — one in “forced migration” and the other in Latin American public policy.

In a March 2009 article which he wrote for the Nation, Boudin described himself as a “foreign policy adviser to [Venezuelan] President Hugo Chavez.”

After earning a JD degree from from Yale Law School in 2011, Boudin spent much of the next three years clerking for two judges – one in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and the other in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. In 2012-13, he also served as a Liman Fellow at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, where he began working full-time in 2015.

In a May 2019 interview, Boudin said he was “proud” to identify openly as a socialist: “When we were kids, socialism was a bad word associated with dictatorships. What we’ve seen over the last five or so years, in large part thanks to Bernie Sanders and all the grassroots organizing that’s gone into making him a national political leader, is that socialism has become something that even mainstream progressives identify with. It means things like universal health care, quality public education for everyone, great housing for everyone.”

In 2019 as well, Boudin was elected District Attorney of San Francisco. Asserting that the American criminal-justice system was thoroughly infested with racism, he said during his campaign: “It’s not a coincidence that the prison population exploded around the same time as working communities, black and brown communities were organizing in the Civil Rights Movement and against the war in Vietnam.”

Pledging to build a justice system “for everyone, not just the wealthy and well-connected,” candidate Boudin told The New York Times that he was “sad that my parents have to suffer what they have to suffer on a daily basis” simply because they were “dedicated to fighting U.S. imperialism around the world.” He explained, moreover, that his parents’ experience as long-term prison inmates had profoundly impacted his own views regarding the inequities of America’s penal system. “My mother spent twenty-two years in prison,” said Boudin. “My father may never get out. I know the destructive impacts of mass incarceration … That’s why I’ve worked my entire life to reform the criminal-justice system…. Throughout my life and legal career, I’ve consistently fought for underdogs.”

Also in the run-up to the 2019 election:

  • Boudin vowed to “decriminalize poverty and homelessness,” saying: “We will not prosecute cases involving quality-of-life crimes. Crimes such as public camping, offering or soliciting sex, public urination, blocking a sidewalk, etc., should not and will not be prosecuted.”
  •  He ran specifically against adding “gang enhancements” to prosecutions of criminals who were also gang members, arguing that nonwhite minorities would be affected disproportionately by such practices.
  • He called for the prosecution and imprisonment of Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents as well as police officers seeking to apprehend criminal aliens.
  • He called for the creation of an “immigrant defense unit” within the DA’s office to “stand up to Trump on immigration.”
  • He vowed to subsidize “universal legal representation” for illegal aliens facing deportation, and to “help every single immigrant victim of every crime obtain a U-Visa.”
  • He maintained that “if we treat the root cause of crime” — most commonly “serious drug addiction, mental illness or both” — “and [we] prioritize treatment over jail and conviction rates, we can actually prevent crime and make our city safer.” “If we as a society give [offenders] the right support and the right supervision and the right resources,” Boudin added, “then I believe that the overwhelming majority of people can live peacefully and productively with the rest of us. But that’s not what our prison system does. It punishes people … in a way that teaches them to be institutionalized and dysfunctional in society. That’s why we see high recidivism rates.”
  • He advocated “a restorative justice approach” that “focuses on making the victim whole, on righting the wrong that was done,” rather than a punitive approach. “If it’s something small,” Boudin explained, “you sit people across from one another, and one says, ‘I spray painted your garage and I’m sorry for that and I want to help make it right by repainting your garage.’”
  • He stated that: “Money bail is a classic example of how the system is broken…. It allows the wealthy to purchase their freedom, no matter how dangerous or how high a risk they pose. Wealth buys the liberty and the presumption of innocence. Meanwhile, the poor languish behind bars even when they pose no risk and the evidence against them is weak.”

Boudin was by far the top fundraiser in the San Francisco DA’s race, collecting more than $623,000 in donations in 2019 alone — much of which came from out-of-state academics, entertainment-industry executives, and influential East Coast attorneys. One of his leading donors was Chloe Cockburn, a prominent partner of George Soros‘s Democracy Alliance. Other top contributors had ties to the Tides Foundation and the Brennan Center for Justice.

Moreover, Boudin’s campaign for DA was vigorously endorsed by such notables as Angela Davis, Linda Sarsour, Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King, the radical Chicago District Attorney Kim Foxx, and Senator Bernie Sanders. When Boudin was elected in November 2019, Sanders tweeted: “Now is the moment to fundamentally transform our racist and broken criminal justice system by ending mass incarceration, the failed war on drugs and the criminalization of poverty. Congratulations @chesaboudin on your historic victory!” At the victory party on the night of Boudin’s election, his supporters chanted: “F*** POA!” (i.e., the Police Officers Association).

Upon formally taking office as DA in early January 2020, Boudin summarily fired seven key felony prosecutors — the most radical cutback of personnel in the San Francisco District Attorney’s office since 1995. One of the fired attorneys told the Bay Area public radio station KQED: “I think the impact on morale is going to be devastating.”

In late January 2020, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Boudin had “decided not to pursue criminal charges against Jamaica Hampton, [a black man] who was shot [by police] after he allegedly attacked two officers with a glass vodka bottle in the Mission District in December [2019].”

In June 2020, Boudin announced that his office would no longer charge any criminal cases that relied on information from police officers who had ever been accused of any type of past misconduct or racial bias. Moreover, Boudin’s office established a new “Trial Integrity Unit” to compile and regularly update a list of officers against whom such misconduct claims had been filed.

On August 25, 2020 — during a violent Black Lives Matter/Antifa riot which followed an incident where a white Kenosha, Wisconsin police officer had shot and permanently disabled a knife-wielding black criminal named Jacob Blake — Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old white youth from Antioch, Illinois, drove to Kenosha, where his father resided, with the intent of: (a) helping to prevent further vandalism in that city, and (b) providing medical aid to people injured in the melee. At the scene of the unrest, Rittenhouse was armed with a semi-automatic rifle that had been purchased (with his money) and held for him by his friend Dominick Black, a resident of Kenosha. When white rioter and Kenosha resident Joseph Rosenbaum — who had spent 15 years in prison for multiple child molestation convictions that included anal rape — chased Rittenhouse, threatened to kill him, and tried to take away his rifle, Rittenhouse fatally shot Rosenbaum. While subsequently being chased by a crowd of approximately a dozen rioters, Rittenhouse ran down a street toward police vehicles, in hopes that the officers might protect him from his pursuers. But the fleeing Rittenhouse tripped and fell to the ground, at which point he was struck on the head by a 39-year-old white man who jump-kicked him. Then, while Rittenhouse was still on the ground, white Silver Lake resident Anthony Huber — a domestic abuse repeater and an ex-convict who in 2013 had pleaded guilty to multiple felony counts of strangulation, suffocation, and false imprisonment — struck him on the head and neck with a skateboard and attempted to pull away his rifle, at which point Rittenhouse killed Huber with a single gunshot to the chest. And when white West Allis resident Gaige Grosskreutz — who had a long arrest history that included multiple misdemeanors and felonies — then approached the fallen Rittenhouse and pointed a handgun directly at him, Rittenhouse shot him once in the right arm, wounding but not killing the man. Rittenhouse was subsequently tried on six criminal charges which included homicide, reckless endangerment, and possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under the age of 18. A large number of leftists portrayed him as a racist, Trump-supporting white vigilante who had recklessly fired his gun at “social justice” and “racial justice” demonstrators in Kenosha. After a jury found Rittenhouse not guilty on all counts on November 19, 2021, Boudin tweeted: “This verdict demonstrates that our work to make our legal system equal, fair, and just is more urgent than ever. Prosecutors have a critical role to play in criminal justice reform and securing equal justice under the law. We will continue our fight for justice.”

On June 8, 2022, Fox News reported: “Voters in San Francisco have chosen to recall embattled District Attorney Chesa Boudin following a recall effort centered on his handling of rising crime across the city. San Francisco voted to recall Boudin with 61%, compared to 39% who wanted him to stay as the district attorney, according to results at the time the Associated Press called the race.… He is the first San Francisco district attorney to be recalled, and only the second to face a recall election.”

Boudin, however, was defiant in spite of the recall vote. At an election-night watch party, he emphasized that his push for leftwing criminal-justice and prison reform would continue. “This is a movement, not a moment in history,” Boudin said. “The coalition that we built… it is broad, it is diverse, it is strong. And it is a coalition that is deeply committed to justice,” he added. Boudin also stated that he himself had grown up in a society that treated people differently based on their race and class – some were given every opportunity to better their lives, while others were “shackled to an existence mired in degradation and humiliation, one known to far too many Americans because of our addiction to caging human beings.”

After Boudin was ousted in the recall election, San Francisco mayor London Breed selected former assistant DA Brooke Jenkins, a 40-year-old black woman who in 2021 had resigned from her job as a prosecutor and become an outspoken critic of Boudin, to replace him. Upon taking over as DA, Jenkins quickly reversed Boudin policies by cracking down on illegal drug dealing in the city. On July 15, 2022, Jenkins fired 16 members of the DA’s office, most of them appointed by Boudin or loyal to him. “Today, I made difficult, but important, changes to my management team and staff that will help advance my vision to restore a sense of safety in San Francisco by holding serious and repeat offenders accountable and implementing smart criminal justice reforms,” Jenkins said in a statement.

In addition to his work as a district attorney, Boudin has also served on the board of the Civil Rights Corps, a national non-profit organization whose mission is to “challenge wealth-based detention and promote anti-carceral alternatives to human caging.” Moreover, he is a board member with Restore Justice, a California-based nonprofit that “advocates for fairness, humanity, and compassion throughout the Illinois criminal justice system, with a primary focus on those affected by extreme sentences imposed on our youth.”

Footnotes:


  1. “My dad also did AIDS organizing in prison,” says Chesa Boudin regarding David Gilbert, who remains incarcerated. After Kathy Boudin was paroled in 2003, she earned an Ed.D. at Columbia Teachers College and then became an adjunct assistant professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work.

Additional Resources:


What San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin Learned from His Terrorist Mom
By Michael Kaplan
May 14, 2022

DA Candidate Chesa Boudin and His Four Parents’ Terrorist Legacy
By Caleb Stewart Rossiter
July 20, 2019

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