With 50 years of courtroom experience, Phoenix Streets, Niki Solis, Maria Evangelista, and Kwixuan Maloof are attempting to unseat and replace four incumbent judges handpicked by Republican governors.
The four San Francisco public defenders made history Wednesday, Feb 7 when they each pulled papers and decided to run for San Francisco Superior Court judge. It turns out that their primary goal is to replace the four incumbents. In California, and most other states, judges are voted for by the people except for when a judge retires or dies in office upon which a governor will appoint a replacement.
Their history-making decision comes on the heels of the ousting of interim San Francisco Mayor London Breed who became the first black woman to lead the city.
Four public defenders, all people of color, have filed to run for San Francisco Superior Court judge — with the specific goal of unseating four longtime incumbents appointed by Republican governors. Yes! https://t.co/tJCD7qN0G9— pdx law grrrl (@pdxlawgrrrl) February 11, 2018
Under Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Judges Curtis Karnow, Jeffrey Ross and Andrew Cheng were all appointed between 2005 and 2009. And Judge Cynthia Lee was appointed in the 90s by former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson.
Solis has worked for 21 years as a public defender and has used her personal experience as a proud lesbian woman and latina to better serve the community. She immigrated from Belize when she was 1-year-old and worked her way up to becoming a public defender.
“As a judicial officer, you have a lot of discretion,” Solis told San Francisco Weekly. “It’s important that everybody who comes before you is viewed as an individual. I don’t think the judiciary in San Francisco is digging deeply enough to get to the root of the problem. We just shove people off to the side, and we don’t ask why. We just ask what.”
For Maloof, he told the outlet that he has had to work harder for his clients of color during his 17-year career as a defense attorney. He believes change will come on the federal level when he is elected to the superior court.
“I sent in my application for judge to the governor years ago,” Maloof explained. “It’s just sitting there. I can’t wait for the governor to decide what San Francisco voters should decide. It’s the perfect time for all of us. Donald Trump has appointed very conservative judges to the bench. One way that you get appointed is by becoming a state superior court judge. So if more of us are superior court judges, that gives the Trump administration a bigger pool to elevate us to the federal bench.”
The Black Lives Matter movement and other civil rights movements motivated Streets to take action. As a superior court judge, he can better serve the black residents of the city and help end racial inequality.
“Look at the racial inequality,” he said. “This city has a population that’s 6 percent or less African American. You go down to the Hall of Justice on any given day, and if you were the judge, you’d think the city was 85 percent Black. A lot of this has to do with implicit bias. A lot of people don’t even know that it’s happening.”
In many ways, Evangelista's motivations fall in line with her peers'. Growing up as the daughter of Mexican-American migrant farmers, she overcame great obstacles to be the first Mexican-American women to graduate from Vanderbilt Law School.
“There are pockets of conservative judges that are not acting like their public servants, they’re acting like they’re conservative politicians when they make their decisions,” Evangelista believes. Too many look at what’s on paper and make blanket charges, without looking at defendants as individual people."
