Here's your baseless accusation of the day

Garry Tan is a techillionaire and the head of Y Combinator which, I gather, does something with tech companies that makes everyone even richer. He’s also one of These Dudes who think they have all the answers for fixing SF but mostly just retweet articles from the Marina Times about people shoplifting from Walgreens. Yesterday he woke up and farted this out:

Oh wow! Sounds bad. I wanna know who these rogue judges are so I tweeted back and asked for their names and got, predictably, nothing. Meanwhile there are tons of replies like “Totally!” and even the Great Elon responded and said “You’re absolutely right” and STILL no one has any idea what they’re talking about or what Garry Tan was talking about.

Until fairly recently, the vast majority of judges with any criminal law background, in California and elsewhere, were former prosecutors and deputy attorneys general and the like. And let me tell you, they were really good at implementing an ideology and that ideology was “help the prosecution out whenever possible.” Now, for the first time ever, yes, a few former public defenders have either been appointed or elected to the bench and although I haven’t studied their records - neither has Garry, btw - I would be surprised if they are “not observing and following the law,” like Garry thinks. (Justice Jackson, incidentally, is the first former public defender on the Supreme Court. I’ll let you guess whether there have been former prosecutors.) And if former public defenders are exercising some measure of mercy, GOOD, because we’ve done the brutalist penal approach for a long time and a slight move back to the middle wouldn’t be the worst thing.

The bigger point, though, is it’s easy to sling garbage accusations like this without providing any factual basis or support for them and that sucks. I happen to know that there are two former public defenders (maybe more, I just know of two) on the SF bench and I’ve never heard anyone complain that either one is unfair or is failing to follow the law. In fact, I was on a jury in a civil case with one of them as the judge and I thought she did a great job. Put up or shut up, Garry.