Pamela Price charging key figure in Brooke Jenkins' office with crime
On Monday evening, Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price announced that she was charging one of her former employees — now a key figure in the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office under Brooke Jenkins — with a misdemeanor for his conduct earlier this year, when he was still employed by Alameda County.
In an email first reported on by Bay Area News Group and also reviewed by SFGATE, Price informed her office that she was charging former Assistant District Attorney Amilcar “Butch” Ford over allegations that he shared confidential information with the defense attorney representing a police officer who shot and killed a man.
Ford was already on administrative leave during the time period when he is accused of sharing confidential information — he said Price placed him on leave in January 2023 over allegations of unspecified, seemingly unrelated “prosecutorial misconduct.” In May, while still on leave, Ford left the DA’s office, penning an incendiary resignation letter trashing the progressive Price on his way out. A few days later, he joined the San Francisco office of Jenkins, the district attorney who replaced ousted progressive Chesa Boudin.
If Ford is found guilty of sharing confidential information about the 2020 police shooting case and convicted under Section 6131(b) of the California Business and Professions Code, he faces disbarment, and would presumably no longer be able to serve Jenkins in his current role.
Jenkins’ office, which declined to comment for this story, has touted Ford’s hiring as an assistant district attorney (ADA) in the homicide department, and given him an important assignment in the office. In a May 30 email to the entire office reviewed by SFGATE, Jenkins called Ford “a highly experienced attorney” and said he is “largely responsible for training the entire Alameda County DA’s office in trial advocacy and the changes of law related to jury selection.”
In a June 13 email, Don du Bain, a top lieutenant to Jenkins, informed the office that certain attorneys would have to undergo mandatory training “given by various ADAs under the direction of ADA Butch Ford, who developed a similar training program for the Alameda County DA’s Office and has volunteered to do the same here.” Those Ford-directed training sessions, according to the email, include “How to Give an Opening Statement” and “How to Cross Examine and Impeach Witnesses.”
The misdemeanor charge against Ford relates back to a case involving former San Leandro police Officer Jason Fletcher, who shot and killed Steven Taylor, a Black man, in April 2020. The killing prompted outrage at the time, and Price’s predecessor Nancy O’Malley — hardly a progressive crusader — charged Fletcher with manslaughter, stating that she believed the evidence did not show Fletcher’s use of force was reasonable, and that he failed to use other de-escalation techniques. It was the first time O’Malley filed charges in a police shooting case.
On Monday, Price stated that Ford, as head of the felony trial team, oversaw the police shooting case for approximately 18 months and attended one court hearing on behalf of the DA’s Office before being replaced by a different attorney.
Section 6131(b) bars a prosecutor who has “prosecuted or in any manner aided or promoted” a case against a suspect from “directly or indirectly, advis[ing] in relation to or tak[ing] any part in the defense” of that suspect. Price alleged that Ford “provided confidential work product information” to Fletcher’s defense attorney, Michael Rains, who also represented Ford himself after Price placed him on administrative leave; according to Price, Ford “relayed the substance of private conversations he had with another attorney in our office in January 2023 regarding the Fletcher case, including case strategy, attorney assignments, charging options, and other professional opinions about various aspects of the case, and that Ford memorialized his conversations with this attorney in a sworn declaration.”
SFGATE reviewed that declaration, which was part of a motion filed by Rains seeking to disqualify Price’s office from prosecuting the case. In the declaration, dated April 17, Ford recounts three conversations from January 2023 that he had with the prosecutor assigned to the Fletcher case. The details Ford recalls are specific; of one conversation, Ford wrote that the attorney had a “confused look” on his face, and of another, alleged that the attorney said, “I don’t give a damn” what a judge had said during a preliminary hearing for the case. He further alleged that he came to believe the attorney “had no idea where the Preliminary Hearing transcript could be found,” prompting Ford to email it to him.
Ford did not return an SFGATE request for comment on this story, nor did the prosecutor Ford mentioned in the declaration. Rains did not reply to an SFGATE request for comment but told Bay Area News Group that the charge is “completely bogus and retaliatory in the extreme.” Ford told the San Francisco Chronicle the information about the Fletcher case that he provided to Rains came when Ford and Rains filed a workplace complaint against the DA’s Office in April, accusing them of “racial discrimination, political retaliation because he had opposed Price’s election and retaliation for a disagreement he had” with the prosecutor mentioned in the declaration, the Chronicle reported (The Chronicle and SFGATE are both owned by Hearst but have separate newsrooms).
The misdemeanor charge against Ford has major implications for both DA offices. For Alameda, it adds a new wrinkle to the ongoing high-profile case against Fletcher; a judge recently rejected the motion from Fletcher’s attorney to disqualify Price’s office from the case, and in the preliminary hearing Ford references, a separate judge questioned whether a jury would vote to convict.
Price’s office did not immediately reply to an SFGATE request for comment, but in her email to staff Monday, she wrote, “It hurts everyone in our community when people who swear to uphold the law break it. Butch Ford broke the public trust and betrayed our office and the people of Alameda County. I know that many of you will be disappointed and disturbed by this turn of events, as am I. The lesson, however, is that no one in our profession, our office or the justice system is above the law.”
For San Francisco, the news of Ford’s charge comes two weeks after Jenkins dropped the final police shooting case filed by Boudin. That move, coupled with her dropping charges in two other police shooting cases, prompted an outcry from advocates who’ve accused Jenkins of improperly shielding members of law enforcement from accountability.
Source: SFGATE
