San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins says a unanimous California Supreme Court decision on bail will undo years of work locking up repeat offenders, and within days of the ruling, defense lawyers moved to spring more than 90 inmates from jail.
The state's high court ruled 7-0 on April 30 that judges must set bail at amounts defendants can actually afford. Only those accused of violent or sexual offenses may be held on unattainable bail or denied bail altogether, the New York Post reported in an exclusive interview with Jenkins. Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero authored the opinion, which grew out of a case involving a homeless man arrested for buying a $7 cheeseburger with a found credit card.
The practical effect landed fast. Defense attorneys in San Francisco cited the new precedent to seek the release of more than 90 people held on charges including drug dealing, theft, and weapons offenses, the Daily Caller reported. Among those who walked out: a woman accused of a 2023 crime spree that included a hammer attack and a robbery with scissors. She left wearing an electronic monitor.
Jenkins did not mince words in her interview with the Post.
"Not only is this a devastating ruling for the DA's office, but a devastating ruling for our state and for San Francisco."
The DA's frustration rests on a specific claim: that swift pretrial detention was working. San Francisco police data cited by the New York Post showed burglaries fell 26 percent, robberies dropped 23 percent, and vehicle theft plunged 44 percent between 2024 and 2025.
Jenkins credited that progress to her office's strategy of keeping career criminals behind bars before trial. She pointed to cases her team had built against chronic retail thieves, the kind of offenders who turned San Francisco into a national symbol of lawless shoplifting.
One of those cases involved Aziza Graves, who allegedly took more than $60,000 in goods from a single Target across 120 visits. Another involved Tyrese Boswell, who allegedly hit one Walgreens 27 times in under six months. These are not one-off incidents. They are patterns, patterns that pretrial detention interrupted.
Now Jenkins says the court has pulled the rug out. Accused drug dealers, auto burglars, serial retail thieves, and some felons caught with guns will be far harder to hold before trial, she told the Post.
"We have demonstrated that swift detention and consequences has worked and now we're going to reverse all of this."
The timing of the ruling adds a bitter edge. A drug bust in San Francisco this week netted 338.5 grams of narcotics and 62 arrests. Of those 62 people, 52 already had outstanding warrants. That ratio, 84 percent of those arrested already wanted on other charges, is a snapshot of the revolving-door problem Jenkins has been fighting.
Under the new bail standard, many nonviolent offenders will cycle back onto the street faster than before. The court's opinion limits judges' authority to hold defendants who cannot post bail unless the charges involve violence or sexual offenses. For a city where chronic property crime and open-air drug markets have driven residents and businesses to the breaking point, the decision amounts to a policy choice imposed by seven justices in Sacramento.
Courts across the country have been wrestling with bail reform for years. But California appears to be moving in the opposite direction from the national trend. The Marshall Project reported that the state is breaking from a broader shift toward tougher pretrial detention rules. Voters in Alabama and Indiana will decide ballot measures this year to expand pretrial holding authority, a sign that the public appetite for softer detention standards may be thinner than progressive advocates assume.
When major court rulings land with political force, the backlash tends to be swift. Jenkins is providing it from an unusual position: a Democratic district attorney in one of the most liberal cities in America, openly warning that her own state's highest court has made her job nearly impossible.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeting cashless bail, according to the Marshall Project's reporting. That federal signal puts the California Supreme Court's decision in sharper relief. While the White House pushes in one direction, the Golden State's judiciary has moved in the other.
Jenkins acknowledged the optics plainly.
"We are going to continue to be the brunt of every joke and attack on Fox News, and rightfully so."
That line is worth pausing on. A sitting San Francisco DA, not a Republican critic, not a cable-news commentator, is conceding that the ridicule her city attracts is earned. She is not blaming outside perception. She is blaming a policy framework that she believes guarantees the outcomes the country mocks.
The ruling also raises questions that remain unanswered. The case name and docket number have not been widely published. The specific legal reasoning Chief Justice Guerrero used to reach the "attainable bail" standard has not been excerpted in detail in available reporting. And it remains unclear how many of the 90-plus release petitions have already been granted.
What is clear is the structural shift. Judges in California now operate under a presumption that nonviolent defendants must be offered bail they can pay. For prosecutors who relied on high bail as a tool to keep serial offenders off the street between arrest and trial, that tool is gone.
The recent pattern of consequential court decisions reshaping state-level policy is not limited to criminal justice. But few rulings carry consequences as immediate and visible as this one. A shoplifter with 120 Target visits on her record. A Walgreens hit 27 times in half a year. A drug bust where five out of six people arrested were already wanted. These are the facts Jenkins is working with.
Jenkins has framed the stakes in blunt terms: the progress her office made on property crime and drug enforcement is now at risk of reversal. Whether she is right will become measurable in the months ahead, as crime data either holds steady or climbs.
The broader lesson, though, is already visible. California's criminal justice establishment, from the legislature to the courts, has spent years loosening the constraints on offenders. Proposition 47 reduced penalties for theft and drug possession. Bail reform advocates pushed to eliminate cash bail entirely. And now the state Supreme Court has told judges they cannot hold nonviolent defendants on bail those defendants cannot afford.
Each step was defended as a matter of fairness. Each step made it harder to keep repeat offenders off the street. And each time the consequences arrived, the retail closures, the open drug markets, the viral shoplifting videos, the same officials expressed surprise.
Jenkins, to her credit, is not expressing surprise. She is expressing alarm. Whether the rest of California's political class listens is another matter. The track record is not encouraging. When courts hand down rulings that reshape the political landscape, the losing side tends to adapt slowly, if at all.
The 7-0 vote means there was no dissent on the bench. Every justice signed on. That unanimity will make the ruling harder to challenge and harder to walk back. Legislative fixes would require the California legislature to act, the same legislature that has spent a decade making the criminal justice system more permissive.
For the residents of San Francisco who watched their city become a national cautionary tale, the ruling is not an abstraction. It is a signal about what comes next. The shoplifters, the dealers, the repeat offenders, they read court rulings too. Or at least their lawyers do.
And those lawyers, within days, filed more than 90 petitions to prove it. The court decisions that reshape policy from the bench rarely come with an accountability mechanism. The justices will not walk the Tenderloin at night. They will not explain to a Target manager why the same person came back for visit 121.
That job falls to prosecutors, police, and the people who live with the results. Jenkins says the court just made that job close to impossible. The next round of crime statistics will tell us whether she was right, but the 52 outstanding warrants in a single drug bust suggest the answer is already taking shape.
When even San Francisco's own DA says the ridicule is deserved, maybe it is time for the state's leaders to stop blaming the critics and start reading the data.