Chesa Boudin is an American lawyer and served as the 29th district attorney of San Francisco since January 8, 2020. He previously served as deputy public defender of San Francisco.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Boudin was recalled from his office by voters in a special recall election on June 7, 2022, and will be removed from office 10 days after the San Francisco Board of Supervisors formally accept the election results, with his immediate replacement being chosen by Mayor London Breed.

Also read: Why Chesa Boudin was recalled as the San Francisco District Attorney

After graduating with his Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 2011, Boudin served as a law clerk to M. Margaret McKeown on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

He went on to work at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office as a post-doctoral fellow in 2012. Boudin clerked for Charles Breyer on the United States District Court for the Northern District of California from 2013 and 2014 before returning to San Francisco as a deputy public defender.

Also read: San Francisco votes to recall District Attorney Chesa Boudin

Boudin, 41, was a first-time political candidate who narrowly won office in November 2019 as part of a national wave of progressive prosecutors who pledged to seek alternatives to incarceration, end the racist war on drugs and hold police officers to account.

But his time in office coincided with a frustrating and frightening pandemic in which viral footage of brazen shoplifting and attacks against Asian American people drove some residents to mount a recall campaign of the former public defender and son of left-wing activists.

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Boudin’s time in office was marked by a bruising battle with the San Francisco Police Department, which accused his office of withholding evidence in a case against an officer. Boudin said police often fail to bring thorough cases to the DA’s office for prosecution, making arrests in just 5% of cases. He made headlines when he disclosed that police had used DNA collected from a rape to arrest the victim in an unrelated property crime.