His Dad Got a Chance at Clemency. Then His Baby Was Born.
In an interview, San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin discusses fatherhood, who deserves to be punished, his relationship with the police, and more.
Late one recent afternoon, Chesa Boudin logged on to Zoom to have a conversation with me while his wife was in labor. His critics see the 41-year-old San Francisco district attorney as a symbol of the progressive legal-reform movement’s excesses. But Boudin has also attracted national attention because his personal story is so extraordinary: When he was barely a toddler, his parents, David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, left him with a babysitter so they could rob a Brink’s armored car with fellow members of radical leftist militant groups. Participants in the robbery shot and killed two police officers and a security guard, and Boudin’s parents were both convicted of felony murder. Boudin was raised by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, leaders of the Weather Underground who, along with Boudin’s birth parents, orchestrated anti-government bombings and anti-war protests, such as the violent 1969 Days of Rage riots in Chicago.
Boudin’s detractors say that rates of certain kinds of crime are up in the city because he does not enforce the law aggressively enough. Two recall campaigns have been launched against him, although one has already failed. He has described the recalls as Republican-backed, and slammed the police union for undermining him. “These tactics have nothing to do with me or my policies and everything to do with a retrograde, reactionary, racist police-union leadership determined to exploit tragedies, undermine criminal-justice reform, and ensure impunity for even those police officers who shoot and kill unarmed Black men,” he told me.
