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San Francisco Chronicle
30-04-2025
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
Former judge accuses DA Brooke Jenkins of hostility toward judges in State Bar complaint
A former judge who has clashed with San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins over her forceful criticism of local judges has filed a complaint with the State Bar accusing Jenkins of showing 'outspoken disrespect' to the city's judges, leading to 'an atmosphere of hostility.' 'District Attorney Brooke Jenkins' incendiary attacks on San Francisco's judiciary are anathema to judicial independence' and 'jeopardize the safety of our judges,' LaDoris Hazard Cordell, a retired Superior Court judge in Santa Clara County, said in an attorney misconduct complaint to the bar last week. Jenkins' office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But last month, after Cordell first asserted that Jenkins had acted improperly, the district attorney accused the former judge — an outspoken critic of the U.S. Supreme Court's conservative majority — of 'hypocritical hand-wringing' for decrying her criticisms of local judges. 'As San Francisco District Attorney it is my responsibility, and right, to share with the public the facts around what happens in criminal cases,' Jenkins said. 'Although some judges on the bench may not like transparency around their decisions, San Franciscans have asked for, expect and deserve to know what is happening at the courthouse.' The State Bar took disciplinary action against Jenkins several weeks ago, sending her to a diversion program for ethics training. The action was in response to complaints that she had improperly shared a confidential report of a defendant's criminal record and that she had misrepresented herself as a volunteer in the successful 2022 recall campaign against her predecessor, Chesa Boudin. Jenkins later disclosed that she earned more than $120,000 as a consultant for three nonprofits tied to the effort — pay she said was unrelated to her work on the recall. The State Bar did not reach a formal decision on whether Jenkins did anything wrong in those matters. It said it found evidence that Jenkins improperly accessed or handled the rap sheet, but would have trouble proving misconduct at a disciplinary hearing. Jenkins was a prosecutor in Boudin's office but resigned in October 2021 to join the recall campaign, which accused Boudin of being too lenient to criminal defendants. Mayor London Breed appointed her to succeed Boudin after the recall, and she was elected to a new four-year term last November. Cordell, a Santa Clara County judge from 1982 to 2001, later served as San Jose's independent police auditor, then was appointed by Boudin to San Francisco's Innocence Commission, which examines inmates' claims of wrongful convictions and recommends actions to the district attorney. She remained on the commission after Jenkins took office but resigned in March, citing the district attorney's increasing criticism of local judges. In her resignation notice and her complaint to the State Bar, Cordell quoted Jenkins' assertion in February that a 'majority' of San Francisco judges 'do not treat drug dealing as a serious crime despite repeat offenses.' After Superior Court Judge Gerardo Sandoval issued a misdemeanor sentence in January 2025 for a minor theft by a man who had previous felony convictions, Cordell noted, Jenkins said Sandoval had ignored 'the clear will of the voters' who passed Proposition 36 in November, allowing felony prison sentences in such cases, and that the sentence 'epitomizes the broken laissez-faire culture at the Hall of Justice.' She said in another case that judges were allowing criminals 'to use this courthouse as a revolving door.' And when Superior Court Judge Kay Tsenin issued a suspended sentence to a mentally ill man who had stabbed an elderly Asian American woman, releasing him after 2 ½ years in jail while requiring five years of treatment, Jenkins joined an angry protest outside Tsenin's courthouse. 'Jenkins' outspoken disrespect to the San Francisco judiciary has contributed to an atmosphere of public hostility against the Court,' Cordell said in her State Bar complaint. 'Judges are not immune from criticism. However, there is a difference between criticizing a judge's ruling and personally attacking the judge and smearing an entire judiciary.'
Yahoo
31-03-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Rayne family reacts after being evacuated from their home due to flash flooding
RAYNE, La. (KLFY)- Nykeesha Boudin said she and her family were evacuated from their residence after Saturday's heavy rainfall caused high water to rush into their home. This comes after the city of Rayne received seven to eight inches of rainfall–causing high water to also rush inside businesses, and forcing cars to stall or run off of the road. Boudin, a single mom of four, said she nor her family have never experienced a flood as massive as this one. 'Never seen it, never went through it ever,' said Boudin. 'This is crazy to me.'' Close Thanks for signing up! Watch for us in your inbox. Subscribe Now Boudin said her home on American Legion Drive is completely flooded. She said her family lost most of their belongings in the flood. 'Me seeing it, it was horrifying, like with my kids especially, I don't know how to feel, like I really lost everything, within hours,' said Boudin. She explained that her and her family were stuck inside of their home until authorities were notified they needed to be rescued. Around 10 p.m. on Saturday, Boudin said the Coast Guard called the and boat carriers were able to safely evacuate them from their home. She said her home is currently unlivable. 'It ain't even about doing something because I'm grateful that me and my kids are here, but it's just like everything I had planned, down the drain, my house, my hard, everything is just gone,' she said. Boudin sends a message to homeowners to make sure they have insurance if they ever experience a natural disaster like this. 'Get insurance on your houses, especially if you have kids, because you can lose it all in a matter of hours and it will be nothing,' said Boudin. To report damage to your home caused by the significant weather, click . Denny Hamlin ends 10-year win drought at Martinsville Speedway Auburn completes sweep of No. 1 seeds into Final Four, beating Michigan State 70-64 Rayne family reacts after being evacuated from their home due to flash flooding Productive afternoon leads Louisiana to victory in Coastal series finale Planning to visit these national parks? You may need to make a reservation to get in Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Boston Globe
27-03-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Michael Boudin, ‘an appellate judge's judge,' who wrote key DOMA ruling, dies at 85
Yet he and the other two judges did just that when they ruled that the law's denial of federal benefits to legally married same-sex couples was unconstitutional. Many legal observers — from conservatives and liberals to activists who supported or opposed LGBTQ rights — saw that DOMA ruling as a significant signpost along the road toward the Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Advertisement 'He was extraordinarily brilliant and history will count him as one of the most significant judges of his era,' said Respected in the federal judiciary and beyond, Mr. Boudin 'was an appellate judge's judge,' said Mr. Boudin 'was a sound, intelligent, and thoughtful judge,' said They had been friends since college, when Mr. Boudin was president of the Harvard Law Review and Breyer served under him as articles editor. Even in that realm, Mr. Boudin's intellect and expansive reading habits were notable, Breyer recalled. Advertisement 'I tend to think he read every great book written in English,' Breyer said. Before becoming a federal judge, Mr. Boudin served in the Reagan administration as a deputy assistant US attorney general in the Justice Department's antitrust division. President George H.W. Bush nominated him in 1990 to serve as a US District Court judge in the District of Columbia. Mr. Boudin was never entirely comfortable in that job, and Mr. Boudin announced plans to leave that judicial appointment and move to Cambridge, and then Though he returned to Boston after serving in one Republican president's administration and being nominated by another to two judgeships, Mr. Boudin's family background was distant from GOP politics. 'He was for me a perfect parent — wise and devoted and considerate and charming — and I told him so,' Mr. Boudin said at a memorial service after Leonard died in 1989. Mr. Boudin's only sibling, his younger sister, Kathy Boudin, was part of the militant Weather Underground. She served 22 years in prison for her role as an unarmed decoy in the 1981 robbery of a Brink's armored truck, during which other robbers shot and killed two police officers and a security guard. Advertisement The narrative of a conservative attorney-turned-judge from a liberal family proved irresistible to many reporters who wrote about Mr. Boudin over the years. But his friends said he was careful to rarely grant interviews and to never let his own political beliefs become part of the public conversation. 'This was a judge's judge, a really powerful mind, always looking for the right answer,' said 'You wouldn't be able to characterize him as conservative or liberal,' Levi said. 'He didn't fit into any of these labels because he such a seeker of the truth.' Mr. Boudin's 'decisions were always guided by the law and constitutional requirements, and not at all by political points of view,' Lynch said. Born in Manhattan, N.Y., on Nov. 29, 1939, Michael Boudin was the only son of Leonard Boudin and Mr. Boudin received a bachelor's degree from Harvard College in 1961 and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1964. He clerked for Friendly was an especially important mentor, whose lessons Mr. Boudin revisited in 'Judge Henry Friendly and the Craft of Judging,' a 2010 University of Pennsylvania Law Review essay. Advertisement For example, Mr. Boudin wrote, Friendly knew 'that an appeal might well have a life after the judgment was handed down.' Many judges assign clerks to write early drafts of decisions, or parts of them. Like Friendly, Mr. Boudin was known for writing his own first drafts and opinions. He wrote in the essay that in complex cases, 'the choices spread out like a maze of tracks in a great railroad terminal. As the forks appear, the seasoned judge who is close to the case is more likely than the clerk to understand the realistic options and select the best route to an outcome.' 'There were times you almost felt superfluous because he was so good,' said David Friedman, who clerked for Mr. Boudin and is now 'In terms of the law,' Friedman said, 'it felt like he already knew all there was to know.' Away from the bench, Mr. Boudin was known for his competitive approach to even a casual game of tennis and for his love of his cats. The last three were Julia, Chloe, and Nougat. Over the years, he would bring his cats into his judge's chambers. Once during a meal with colleagues, the swirl of topics turned to the projected end of the universe, when all life would vanish. 'The problem,' Mr. Boudin deadpanned with sincerity, 'is that then there would be no cats.' A memorial gathering will be planned for Mr. Boudin. In addition to his wife, and her three daughters from before they married, he leaves a nephew, Advertisement 'What a profoundly impactful and brilliant and respected jurist he was,' Chesa said. To his friends among other jurists, Mr. Boudin's devotion to the law seemed matched by his unending desire to keep learning by reading book after book. 'One passion was as an appellate judge, but the other was trying to understand this complex world in which we find ourselves, the human condition, how we make sense of it all,' Marshall said. 'He had a broad inquiring mind. That, to me, was Michael.' Bryan Marquard can be reached at
New York Times
25-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Michael Boudin, Independent Judge From a Family on the Left, Dies at 85
Michael Boudin, a federal appeals court judge who was a scion of one of America's best-known leftist families but who forged an independent path on the bench, died on Monday in Boston. He was 85. His death, in a memory care facility, resulted from complications of dementia and Parkinson's disease, said his nephew Chesa Boudin, the former district attorney of San Francisco. Judge Boudin — the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which covers most of New England and Puerto Rico, from 2001 to 2008 — was the odd man out in a family devoted to left-leaning causes. A former corporate lawyer with Covington & Burling, where he worked for 21 years, he was the brother of Kathy Boudin, a member of the radical Weather Underground. She served 22 years in prison for her part in the 1981 holdup of a Brink's armored truck in which two policeman and a guard were killed. His father was Leonard B. Boudin, one of the most celebrated civil liberties lawyers of the 1950s, '60s and '70s, who took a public stand against McCarthyism and whose clients included Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, and the Rev. Philip Berrigan, the antiwar activist. His parents, in their Greenwich Village home, hosted a salon for fellow liberals and leftists. And as San Francisco's district attorney, Chesa Boudin, Kathy Boudin's son, became known for his efforts to cut down on incarcerations and his intolerance of police brutality. To conservatives, he became a symbol of progressive overreach and served less than three years, before a recall election ended his tenure in 2022. Judge Boudin was not easy to pigeonhole ideologically. On the bench, he once concurred in a ruling against affirmative action at Boston Latin School — a conservative position that might have rankled his father. In private practice, he 'defended companies accused of being monopolies,' Chesa Boudin said in an interview, though Judge Boudin himself was a nephew of the independent journalist I.F. Stone, who exposed government scandals and the corporate-Defense Department nexus during the Vietnam War era and before. Judge Boudin's best known opinion dealt a critical blow to the Defense of Marriage Act, the Clinton-era law that defined marriage as between a man and a woman. In 2012, he and two other judges on the First Circuit court ruled that the law's denial of federal benefits to same-sex couples was unjust. The decision was narrow, and not necessarily an endorsement of same-sex marriage, but legal scholars considered it a significant step on the road to normalizing it. In his opinion, Judge Boudin wrote of his reservations about the law's 'effort to put a thumb on the scales and influence a state's decision as to how to shape its own marriage laws.' The decision was upheld by the United States Supreme Court a year later. The judge's caution reflected his diverse professional antecedents: He had been a law clerk to Judge Henry J. Friendly, a conservative Republican, whom he revered; nominated to the federal bench by Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a Democrat; and appointed by a Republican president, George H.W. Bush. 'He was pretty pragmatic and mainstream,' his nephew said. 'He was an intellectual who brought his full brain power to the law.' Where his parents' salon in some ways epitomized the 1960s spirit of revolt and freedom, Judge Boudin had a rather strict view of duties and responsibilities to society. In 2007, for instance, he rebuked a lower court judge for sparing a drug trafficker from prison. 'Sentences with no (or trivial) prison time have been scrutinized severely on appellate review,' Judge Boudin wrote in his ruling, adding, 'Even taking account of both cooperation and contrition, it is far from clear that adequate basis could be furnished for a near-zero prison sentence.' Chesa Boudin said: 'We're all our own people. He got along very well with his father. He was very angry with his sister for what she did. She caused a tremendous amount of harm.' Nonetheless, he added, during Ms. Boudin's years at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, N.Y. — she was released in 2003 — Judge Boudin would occasionally visit her. 'He cared about her well-being, but he was a disappointed older brother,' Chesa Boudin said. Ms. Boudin, who died in 2022 at 78, first achieved public notoriety in March 1970, when the Greenwich Village townhouse where she was living blew up. Her colleagues had set up a makeshift bomb factory there; three were killed on the spot, and Ms. Boudin, who had been showering, had to scramble away half-naked. Her brother, meanwhile, was immersed in his corporate law firm. 'While Michael was making partner at Covington & Burling, Kathy was making bombs in Greenwich Village,' David Margolick wrote in a 1992 profile of Michael Boudin in The New York Times. On Monday, his colleagues on the bench celebrated his intellectual acuity and devotion to the law. 'Judge Michael Boudin was one of the greatest federal judges of his generation, known and widely respected for his brilliance and wisdom,' Judge Sandra L. Lynch, a former First Circuit chief judge, wrote in a news release. 'His work embodied the virtues of judicial restraint and showed extraordinary mastery of the doctrines undergirding the Constitution.' Michael Boudin was born in Manhattan on Nov. 29, 1939. His mother was Jean (Roisman) Boudin, who was the sister of I.F. Stone's wife, Esther Stone. Michael attended Elisabeth Irwin High School in Manhattan and graduated from Harvard College in 1961 with a bachelor's degree. He was president of the Harvard Law Review and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1964. He was a clerk to Judge Friendly, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, covering New York, Connecticut and Vermont, from 1964 to 1965, and clerk to Justice John Harlan of the Supreme Court from 1965 to 1966. He joined Covington & Burling that year, and in 1987 became deputy assistant attorney general in the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice until 1990. He was appointed that year to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where he served until 1992, when he was appointed to the circuit court. Apart from his nephew, Judge Boudin is survived by his wife, Martha A. Field, a Harvard Law professor, from whom he was separated. Judge Boudin was not keen on interviews. But Mr. Margolick, in his 1992 Times article, cited a questionnaire the judge had filled out for the Senate Judiciary Committee when it was considering his nomination. 'He described the tenets of his judicial thinking: self-discipline in defining and exercising authority, particularly over statutes, but vigilance where constitutional rights are concerned,' Mr. Margolick wrote. In a tribute on Monday, Judge Boudin's friend the retired Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer wrote: 'What Michael loved was to learn, through reading and discussion, about our nature — we human beings — how we lived together in societies. How we maintained our freedom.'
