Chesa Boudin
Based on Wikipedia: Chesa Boudin
The Son of Radicals
When Chesa Boudin was fourteen months old, his parents went to prison for murder. His mother received twenty years to life. His father received seventy-five years to life. The crime was their participation in a botched armored car robbery in Rockland County, New York, that left two police officers and a security guard dead.
His parents weren't ordinary criminals. Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert were members of the Weather Underground, a radical leftist organization that emerged from the anti-Vietnam War movement and embraced violent tactics, including bombings, to advance revolutionary politics. The 1981 Brink's robbery was supposed to fund their operations. Instead, it ended their freedom and orphaned their toddler son.
Boudin was adopted by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn—themselves former Weather Underground members who had avoided prosecution—and raised in Hyde Park, Chicago. He didn't learn to read until age nine. His mother was released on parole in 2003, when he was twenty-three. His father remained incarcerated until 2021, serving forty years.
This is the origin story of the man who would become San Francisco's district attorney in 2020, and the first DA in California history to be successfully recalled from office.
A Family Business of Radicalism
The Boudin name carries significant weight in American left-wing history. It's not just Chesa's parents. The lineage runs deep.
His great-grand-uncle, Louis B. Boudin, was a Marxist theoretician who wrote a two-volume history of the Supreme Court's influence on American government. His grandfather Leonard Boudin was a civil liberties attorney famous—or infamous, depending on your perspective—for representing clients like Fidel Castro and Paul Robeson, the singer and activist who was blacklisted during the Red Scare.
His grand-uncle was I. F. Stone, the legendary independent journalist known for his left-progressive muckraking newsletter that challenged government narratives for decades.
There was one notable exception to the family's political trajectory. His uncle, Michael Boudin, became a well-regarded judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. He was appointed by George H.W. Bush. The conservative judge in a family of radicals.
The Making of a Progressive Prosecutor
Despite—or perhaps because of—his unconventional upbringing, Boudin pursued an elite education. He attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, then Yale College. In 2003, he became a Rhodes Scholar at St Antony's College, Oxford, where he earned a Master of Science in forced migration—an academic field that studies refugees, displaced populations, and the conditions that create them.
Before law school, he traveled to Venezuela and worked as a translator in the presidential palace during Hugo Chávez's administration. This wasn't mere tourism. Boudin later translated a book of Chávez's speeches into English and co-wrote a book called "The Venezuelan Revolution: 100 Questions – 100 Answers." He also published a memoir about his time in Latin America titled "Gringo: A Coming of Age in Latin America." Critics gave it mixed reviews.
He earned his law degree from Yale Law School in 2011, then embarked on an impressive series of clerkships. He clerked for Judge M. Margaret McKeown on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, then for Judge Charles Breyer—brother of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer—on the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.
In 2015, he joined the San Francisco Public Defender's Office full-time as a deputy public defender. There, he made his mark on an issue that would define his later career: bail reform. He argued that California's bail system was unconstitutional, and in the case In re Kenneth Humphrey, an appeals court agreed, ruling that judges must consider a defendant's ability to pay before setting bail. This was a major victory for criminal justice reformers who argued that cash bail essentially created two justice systems—one for those who could afford freedom while awaiting trial, and another for those who couldn't.
The 2019 Election
Boudin ran for San Francisco district attorney in 2019 on what he called a "decarceration" platform. The word itself signals his philosophy: the opposite of incarceration, a systematic reduction in the use of jails and prisons.
His campaign promises were ambitious and controversial. He pledged to eliminate cash bail, establish a unit to review wrongful convictions, and refuse to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement—commonly known as ICE—on raids and arrests. In San Francisco, a sanctuary city that already limited cooperation with federal immigration authorities, this last promise resonated with many voters.
The San Francisco Police Officers Association saw Boudin as an existential threat. They spent $650,000 trying to defeat him. It wasn't enough.
Boudin defeated Suzy Loftus, who had been appointed interim DA just weeks before the election in what critics called a cynical political maneuver. Attorney General William Barr, then serving under President Trump, criticized Boudin and similar reform-minded prosecutors around the country, accusing them of "undermining the police, letting criminals off the hook, and endangering public safety."
Boudin won anyway. He was sworn in on January 8, 2020, by San Francisco Mayor London Breed. Within days, he fired seven prosecutors and began restructuring the office.
The Reform Agenda in Practice
Boudin's tenure was defined by policies designed to reduce incarceration and address what he saw as systemic inequities in the criminal justice system.
In January 2020, he eliminated cash bail entirely, replacing it with what he called a "risk-based system." Instead of setting a dollar amount that defendants had to pay for pretrial release, prosecutors would evaluate whether each defendant posed a genuine threat to public safety. Those deemed low-risk would be released without payment.
Human Rights Watch praised the decision. The police union condemned it as an "arbitrary math equation" that would create a "criminal justice revolving door."
In February, Boudin announced that his office would no longer pursue charges for contraband discovered during "pretextual" traffic stops—situations where police pull someone over for a minor infraction like a broken taillight, then search the vehicle for drugs or weapons. Civil rights advocates had long argued that such stops disproportionately targeted Black and Latino drivers. Boudin also announced that prosecutors would stop seeking sentence enhancements for gang membership or for defendants with three strikes on their record, again citing racial disparities in how these enhancements were applied.
When COVID-19 arrived in March 2020, Boudin reduced San Francisco's jail population by twenty-five percent, prioritizing the release of older inmates, those with health conditions, and those serving time for misdemeanors. By April, the reduction reached approximately forty percent.
During the George Floyd protests that summer, Boudin implemented new police accountability measures. He called on the State Bar of California to prohibit prosecutors from accepting campaign contributions from police unions, citing potential conflicts of interest. He announced that his office would not bring cases based solely on the testimony of officers with histories of misconduct. And he filed what he called the "first-ever use-of-force case against an on-duty officer for excessive force" in San Francisco.
The Backlash
To Boudin's supporters, these policies represented long-overdue criminal justice reform. To his critics, they represented dangerous naivety—or worse.
Several high-profile cases fueled the perception that Boudin was soft on crime. In January 2020, he suspended prosecution of a man named Jamaica Hampton, who had been shot by police after striking an officer with a liquor bottle. Boudin's office said the suspension was necessary to avoid conflicts with a potential prosecution of the officer who shot Hampton. The police union said Boudin was "giving criminals a green light" to attack officers. (Hampton was eventually charged with assault in April 2021.)
Property crime rates in San Francisco, already high, remained a persistent concern. Car break-ins were rampant. Videos of brazen shoplifting went viral on social media. While many of these problems predated Boudin's tenure and stemmed from complex factors including the pandemic and California's Proposition 47—a 2014 ballot measure that reclassified many thefts as misdemeanors—Boudin became a convenient target for public frustration.
Asian American communities expressed particular anger after a wave of assaults on elderly Asian residents during the pandemic. One February 2020 incident, captured on video, showed a man swinging a metal bar at an elderly Asian man and stealing his aluminum cans. Boudin charged the attacker with elder abuse and robbery, but when he dropped related charges against a bystander who had filmed the attack, critics accused him of being too lenient.
Perhaps more damaging than any specific case was the perception of chaos within Boudin's office. He had fired prosecutors upon taking office. Others quit publicly and joined the recall effort against him. One of those who resigned, Brooke Jenkins, became a leading voice for Boudin's removal.
The Recall
Recall efforts began almost as soon as Boudin took office. By 2022, they had gained enough signatures to place a recall election on the June ballot.
The recall campaign attracted significant outside funding, including from Republican donors and tech executives who were frustrated with quality-of-life issues in San Francisco. Boudin's supporters argued that he was being scapegoated for broader societal problems and targeted by law enforcement interests seeking revenge for his reform agenda.
On June 7, 2022, fifty-five percent of San Francisco voters chose to remove Boudin from office. He became the first district attorney in San Francisco history to be recalled, and the first DA in California to be successfully removed from office.
Mayor London Breed—the same mayor who had sworn Boudin in two and a half years earlier—appointed Brooke Jenkins to replace him. Jenkins, who had quit Boudin's office to campaign for his recall, would go on to win a special election to complete his unexpired term.
The Larger Context
Boudin's rise and fall reflected a broader national experiment with progressive prosecution. In cities across America, reformist district attorneys had won elections on platforms similar to Boudin's: reducing incarceration, ending cash bail, holding police accountable, and addressing racial disparities in the criminal justice system.
George Gascón in Los Angeles. Larry Krasner in Philadelphia. Kim Foxx in Chicago. Rachael Rollins in Boston. These prosecutors represented a new movement that rejected the tough-on-crime orthodoxy that had dominated American politics since the 1980s.
But by 2022, the political winds were shifting. Crime rates had risen during the pandemic—though criminologists debated how much and why. Republican politicians made urban crime a centerpiece of their messaging. And in San Francisco, a city that prides itself on progressive values, voters decided they had seen enough of the progressive prosecution experiment.
Whether Boudin's recall represented a rejection of criminal justice reform itself, or merely a rejection of how he implemented it, remains a matter of fierce debate. His critics say he was an ideologue who prioritized abstract theories over public safety. His supporters say he was making necessary changes to a broken system and was undermined by police unions, conservative donors, and a media environment that amplified fear of crime.
The Weight of History
Chesa Boudin's story is inseparable from his family's story. He was born to radicals who committed murder in the name of revolution. He was raised by radicals who escaped prosecution for their own violent acts. He came of age visiting his parents in prison, knowing that his father might die there.
He could have retreated from politics entirely, could have pursued a quiet legal career far from controversy. Instead, he ran for the same kind of office that had prosecuted his parents. He sought the power to decide who goes to prison and who goes free.
His critics saw this as disqualifying—the child of cop-killers now deciding whether to prosecute crimes against police. His supporters saw it as uniquely qualifying—someone who understood the human costs of incarceration, who had seen its effects on families, who knew that the criminal justice system often fails to deliver justice.
In the end, the voters of San Francisco rendered their verdict. But the questions Boudin's tenure raised—about punishment and reform, about safety and justice, about who deserves second chances and who decides—those questions remain very much unresolved.