As San Franciscans benchmark the performance of their judges in the run up to next year’s judicial elections they will see instances of commendable action to protect public safety mixed with much unwarranted kowtowing to violent thugs and drug traffickers.
Among the 20 or so judges who might be challenged this time round are some facing real questions about their unwillingness to keep dangerous criminals behind bars and the mayhem predictably unleashed as a consequence.
If he decides to go before the voters then Judge Brendan Conroy is perhaps the most likely to attract a challenger and the most vulnerable to getting knocked off if one arises.
The ex-public defender’s crowning achievement in his current term was to resentence a ‘life without parole’ killer who tortured to death a San Francisco child while he begged for mercy.
Edward Kennedy tied-up, stripped and stabbed Sergio Crockett at his Outer Sunset home. After reassuring him that he was being driven to hospital, and as the boy pleaded for his life, Kennedy “wailed” on the child, inflicting another 44 stab wounds, before dumping his body.
At a hearing in 2022 – described by district attorney Brooke Jenkins as a “travesty” – Conroy dismissed special circumstances found true by the trial jury which, as a result, allowed him to cancel Kennedy’s life without parole sentence and make him eligible for a parole hearing.
The judge will presumably feel confident he has a complete defense to any suggestion that he is not in tune with San Francisco voters’ sensibilities vis-a-vis child-torturing killers, and will look forward to the opportunity that any campaign would provide for him to advance it.
After Conroy comes a group of judges vying with each other for the ‘most lenient’ title with respect to their kid-glove treatment of illegal alien drug dealers let out again and again to wreak havoc on the city and kill the weak-minded addicts attracted by their wares.
In a crowded field, perhaps Judge Gerardo Sandoval wins by a nose. It’s not that he doesn’t appreciate drug traffickers are a public menace – he does – but rather that this doesn’t often translate in to him keeping them locked up. The judge is also remarkably incurious about whether the defendant before him is, in fact, an illegal alien.
In April this year Judge Sandoval granted pre-trial release to Darnel Scott who had been brought to court after running away from police anxious to speak with him about the two firearms, one of which was a machine gun, that he had stuffed down his pants.
The next month Scott was arrested by Antioch PD and charged by Contra Costa County prosecutors with the January lying-in-wait murder of Tre-4 gang member Natali Cisneros.
Recently appointed to the bench, Judge Brian Stretch has already shown a remarkable flair for giving the benefit of the doubt to Honduran drug traffickers.
Last year he released four-time deportee Brayan Lopez-Cruz after he was caught with huge quantities of drugs and more than $1000 in cash while on probation.
Unsurprisingly Lopez-Cruz went straight back to selling fentanyl in the city and he was arrested again months later – a development which caused federal authorities to act.
In April this year a federal judge was aghast at the leniency shown to Lopez-Cruz.
“This suggests to me that maybe the judges aren’t doing the right thing – somebody’s not doing the right thing,” U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer said of his state counterparts at the Hall of Justice as he sentenced Lopez-Cruz to three years’ imprisonment.
In 2021 Judge Michael McNaughton sentenced Brandon Paillet to six months’ imprisonment – which would have been three months in practice because of ‘half-time credits’ – after a conviction for theft. Paillet had been arrested 54 times for violence and property crimes and had already racked up four juvenile adjudications and 12 convictions.
After his release he was arrested a further four times in 2021 including for taking a disabled woman hostage in her Corona Heights home, and for carjacking a van with someone inside.
After he terrorized parents at a San Francisco elementary school while in possession of a stolen, loaded pistol, he was prosecuted by federal authorities.
U.S. District Judge Susan Illston sentenced Paillet to five years’ imprisonment for gun possession.
Judges including Christine Van Aken, Alexandra Robert Gordon and Richard Darwin went out of their way to give lenient treatment to illegal alien drug dealer Hanti Gamez.
The predictable consequence was that, in 2023, a young teacher in San Francisco dropped dead after taking fentanyl sold by Gamez in the guise of cocaine.
The Honduran had racked up 14 arrests at the time of the teacher’s death.
“He was in the state court system being treated as if he was hardly doing anything wrong,” said U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney who sentenced Gamez to nine years in March 2025.
“The would put him on probation…and within days he would be back on the streets committing another crime.
“At some point it’s pretty clear that the state system totally dropped the ball.”
Newly-appointed judge Adrienne Rogers has also shown a trusting approach to releasing defendants accused of violent crime.
On August 16 2024 Rogers released 13-time felon Samuel Cox who had been arrested after failing to appear in court in an attempted robbery case. Nine days later Cox cut off his ankle monitor and attacked a man on a Tenderloin street, leaving his victim in a hospital intensive care unit with a bleeding brain and multiple head fractures.
There is plenty of blame to go around, of course, and most of these judicial officers might fairly feel aggrieved if they attract challengers. After all, the thinking will surely go, they are not particularly out of step with their colleagues and the fact that some spectacularly poor case outcomes receive the glare of publicity is no more than bad luck.
They will take comfort from the reality that any opponent faces an uphill struggle. The last attempt to unseat judges ended in a debacle as the soft-on-crime duo of Patrick Thompson and Michael Begert won handily in what was a rebuke to the milquetoast campaign mounted by the judicial hopefuls that stood against them.
These steep odds are reinforced by the time-honored rituals of competitive judicial elections foremost of which is the rallying of progressive law professors and ex-judges to incumbents’ defense.
Voters will be sternly told it is a danger to the rule of law for those on the bench to have to justify their records to the electorate and that, in any case, they are too uninformed to generate a credible view on judicial performance.
This collegiality ensures judges are largely untroubled by electoral pressures from the moment they are anointed via the opaque judicial appointments process until retirement.
Whether any of San Francisco’s current crop will see their judicial careers cut short remains to be seen.
Judicial elections will next take place in San Francisco on June 2 2026. This is a primary election, at which challengers may stand against incumbents, and if any candidate takes more than 50% of the vote they are elected outright then and there. If no one secures more than 50% then the two best-placed contenders advance to the general election on November 3 2026.
It will be clear by mid-March 2026 at the latest whether any sitting judge will face a challenger. In San Francisco virtually all judges are elected unopposed.
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