San Francisco just can't seem to get its act together. The latest failure involves the courts which have struggled to keep up with the caseload since the start of the pandemic. But a ruling last month from an Appeals Court means that the city's time is up.

In a ruling that could lead to dismissal of hundreds of Bay Area criminal cases, a state appeals court says a San Francisco woman was denied her constitutional right to a speedy trial by years of delays that a trial judge attributed to the pandemic and overcrowded courtrooms. 

Lynette Mendoza was charged in October 2021 with two misdemeanors for allegedly driving while drunk and a third for driving at night without her headlights on. She pleaded not guilty and was scheduled for trial in March 2023, weeks after Gov. Gavin Newsom ended the “stayat-home” order he had issued nearly three years earlier because of COVID-19.

But a Superior Court judge postponed the trial, saying the pandemic was still affecting court staff and courtroom availability. It was the first of six postponements for similar reasons that a series of judges ordered through March 2024, when Mendoza, represented by the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, sought dismissal of the charges under the Constitution’s Sixth Amendment, which guarantees criminal defendants “the right to a speedy and public trial.”

It shouldn't take three years to handle a DUI case but in San Francisco it does. For most of that time, judges claimed that the state of emergency caused by the pandemic allowed them to delay trials beyond the usual limits. But the dismissal of this one case last month was a sign that the pandemic excuse is no longer going to work. It meant that a lot more dismissals were coming.

California law sets certain time limits by which a defendant must go to trial. In a misdemeanor case, the court must dismiss the case if it is not brought to trial within the time specified by law unless there is a compelling legal reason to delay or the defendant waives their right to a speedy trial...

“There are potentially hundreds of misdemeanor cases in superior court that are beyond the statutory last day to commence trial under section 1382,” the opinion reads. “It appears that many of the defendants in those cases sought dismissal on the same basis as petitioner.”

According to a report by the SF Standard, dozens of those cases are being dismissed today. All of these people, including some arrested for domestic violence, are going to be given a pass because SF courts could not get their act together.

A San Francisco court will drop charges against dozens of people accused of DUIs, domestic violence, sexual battery and deadly driving Thursday morning, citing a July ruling that courts can no longer use pandemic-era backlogs to delay trials past their legal deadlines.

District Attorney Brooke Jenkins and the public defender’s office blamed the Superior Court for failing to try cases in a timely manner — thereby delaying defendants’ constitutional right to a speedy trial.

“They should’ve found a way to try these cases,” said Sujung Kim, a managing attorney in the San Francisco public defender’s office. “It’s not that we or our clients are trying to evade responsibility; we were ready to go to trial. But we can’t do anything if the court won’t give us our day in trial.”

How many more DUIs or sexual assaults will happen because these people are all back on the street with no charges? That's a question that should haunt the courts and the DA. It's not as if this problem snuck up on anyone. This has been going on for years and finally their excuses stopped working.

And it's not just the cases dismissed today. Some cases that have already concluded will likely be appealed now on the grounds that they also had to wait too long for trial. If you're a fan of criminal justice reform this is like Christmas. Just open the prisons and let people out.

But if you're a citizen trying to live a normal life in San Francisco your safety has just been compromised. We may not see the outcome of that immediately but sooner or later, someone who was let off this week will be back in the news for running someone down while drunk or beating up another victim. It's inevitable. 

The people responsible for this failure should be fired, recalled or whatever else is needed to make sure they personally pay a price for this failure.