Don't expect justice from Progressives

Chesa Boudin is starting to sweat

By Monica Showalter

With a voter recall four months away, things aren't going too well for San Francisco's far-left District Attorney Chesa Boudin, whose office appears to now be a dumpster fire of controversies.

Thursday the news got out through court transcripts that a shouting match broke out in a courthouse, between Chesa's staff and the lawyers of a witness, Magen Hayashi, who testified that Chesa's D.A. office told her to withhold critical evidence that could exculpated an officer in a police brutality case. The D.A.'s investigation of the matter neglected to mention that the cop in question was answering a domestic violence call and didn't just start beating the suspect for no good reason. The officer's defense team thought that relevant, and apparently, Chesa's staff were intimidating the witness.

According to the San Francisco Examiner:

“After the court exited the courtroom,” [Defense attorney Nicole] Pifari told the judge, attorneys for the DA’s office “started yelling at… began to yell at counsel for Ms. [Magen] Hayashi telling him to do his job.”

Pifari told the judge that one of the attorneys for the DA’s office “pointed at the witness and told her she was being accused of a crime. It’s intimidating a witness, it’s unprofessional, it’s very problematic that they’re trying to affect the testimony of this witness off the record. I have a real problem with what just happened. They were yelling at her attorney in open court.” It’s not clear what crime the attorney allegedly referred to.

“OK. Let’s not yell, OK? Thank you,” judge Teresa Caffese said, according to the transcript of the testimony.

“Will the court please instruct attorneys for the DA’s office to not address the witness, talk to her, point at her and tell her she’s — you know, off-the-record having discussions with the witness, it’s totally inappropriate,” Pifari said.

An attorney for the DA’s office responded, “For the record, (the attorney for the investigator) was yelling too.”

 Obviously, her testimony was bothering them, despite the fact that the leftist judge seemed to think it was as irrelevant to the case as Chesa did. 

It got the defense lawyer barking, and even more significantly, it got the San Francisco police chief furious. Chief Bill Scott yanked all cooperation with the D.A.'s office on investigation of police brutality cases as a result of this sneaky bid to stack the deck against the accused cop. That's rather a heavy blow to Chesa, who goes at these cases with a gusto that's wholly lacking in his prosecution of violent crime.

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