A Liberal Lays Down the Law in S.F.

The campaign had been tough and the honeymoon rocky. But barely five months into his tenure as district attorney, here was Terence Hallinan beating a path to the door of a crowded steakhouse, a fellow diner hurling obscenities his way.

The man was incensed about the way Hallinan had fired several veteran prosecutors, including the son of a friend: He had left pink slips on the attorneys’ chairs while they were out to lunch.

“Your problem, Terry, is that you have no balls!” Joe O’Donoghue, a developer, shouted at Hallinan toward the end of a birthday party attended by the city’s political elite.

Living up to his boyhood nickname, “Kayo,” Hallinan turned toward O’Donoghue and let his fists fly, landing a blow. Neither man was hurt. But the scuffle more or less defined Hallinan’s first year as San Francisco’s top prosecutor.

Reputed to be the most unconventional and politically liberal district attorney in the nation, Hallinan has found himself at the center of one fray after another as he has sought to soften the tone of prosecution and adjust priorities away from nonviolent crimes. He refuses to charge nonviolent felonies as third strikes and was the only district attorney in the state to endorse the medical marijuana initiative. He now champions its implementation.

In the 15 months since taking over the office, Hallinan, 60, has presided over two purges of prosecutors to make room for more minorities and gays. His office became embroiled in a sex scandal. And the fisticuffs at Izzy’s Steaks and Chops were reported by one paper like a boxing match, complete with the jousters’ ages, height, weight and reach. Hallinan’s office even became the butt of jokes on the “David Letterman” show.

“Breaking in was kind of rough,” Hallinan admitted sheepishly in an interview one recent morning, seated behind his desk at the Hall of Justice.

Although it is difficult to dramatically transform an institution as large and tradition-bound as a big-city district attorney’s office, Hallinan has set a tone that stresses prevention over prosecution.

The longtime criminal defense attorney and former city supervisor has decided that some drug dealers should be mentored, rather than jailed. He has pledged severity toward police misconduct and sensitivity to the needs of tenants and minorities. And he has made combating domestic violence a strong and conspicuous priority.

Keeping a campaign pledge, he has pushed prosecutors to visit the city’s neighborhoods, even ordering black jackets for them emblazoned in yellow with “Community District Attorney” on one side and his name on the other.

“He is trying to turn the office into the Department of Social Services,” complained former prosecutor Joseph Russionello, the U.S. attorney here under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

Police officers who knew Hallinan from the days when he defended the people they arrested remain squeamish.

“He is held in the esteem that one would imagine a renowned drug attorney would be held in by working cops,” said acting Police Capt. Gregory Corrales, former head of narcotics, one of the few officers who would speak of Hallinan for the record.

The legal community also has its reservations. “He doesn’t know law, and he has no respect for order,” an influential lawyer in private practice here said of the man who once defended mass murderer Juan Corona and Patricia Hearst.

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That Hallinan is no ordinary district attorney was readily apparent from his office. A wall of photographs shows him with communist scholar Angela Davis and at a Vietnam War protest march where he held up a banner that said “Bring the Troops Home Now.” Plastic dinosaurs and multicolored pegs belonging to his 3-year-old daughter, Vivian, whom he had brought to work, littered the floor.

Although many of Hallinan’s views appear radical next to those of most district attorneys, they put him at odds with some of the more liberal members of his family, who never dreamed any of them would be a prosecutor.

The second of six boys, he grew up in a famously radical family--sometimes called San Francisco’s Kennedys--during the Joseph McCarthy era. The Hallinan name is revered by many here, particularly among the city’s more liberal Irish, as a symbol of bucking the establishment.

The late Vincent Hallinan, Terence’s father, was a famed criminal defense lawyer who was jailed several times for contempt of court and ran for president in 1952 on the Progressive Party ticket from prison.

An atheist, the senior Hallinan once sued the Catholic Church to set aside the will of a jury commissioner he disliked. He charged that the church had fraudulently induced the man to leave his money by telling Catholics they could get to heaven faster by bequeathing.

Although he lost the lengthy case, he later boasted that he at least had kept the dead man in purgatory those years.

The elder Hallinan was in prison during Terence’s teenage years, a time when Terence got into so many scrapes with the police that the State Bar of California later tried to deny him a license to practice law.

Terence became active in the anti-war movement and was arrested 16 times during civil rights protests.

As a lawyer, he labored under the shadow of his brother Patrick, his elder by two years, who came to be considered one of the best criminal defense lawyers in the city. Terence eventually found his own niche in politics, winning election to the city’s raucous Board of Supervisors in 1988 and 1992 and building a grass-roots liberal constituency.

On the board, Hallinan became best known for sponsoring legislation that made it illegal to discriminate against transsexuals, securing funding for after-school sports programs and launching a study of prostitution, which he believes should be decriminalized. While serving at City Hall, Hallinan also was sued by a former aide for sexual harassment. The case was settled out of court.

With his experience in law enforcement largely limited to fighting it, he ran for district attorney after term limits forced him from the Board of Supervisors. He pledged during his campaign to push for alternatives to jail for nonviolent offenses and to be tough on violent crime.

He lacked the support of the city’s two major newspapers, but his message resounded with San Francisco’s traditionally liberal voters. The 16-year incumbent, Arlo Smith, lost out in a three-way race, putting Hallinan and former Deputy Dist. Atty. Bill Fazio into a runoff.

Fazio billed himself as the law-and-order candidate, while Hallinan presented himself as the candidate of change. He was elected to the $130,000-a-year post with 50.1% of the vote in the same runoff that put former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown in the mayor’s office.

Brown and Hallinan are longtime political allies and friends.

Hallinan is slender with thick, wavy graying hair combed back from his forehead. He wears glasses and fashionable, but not flashy, suits and ties. The father of four children, two from a previous marriage and one from an out-of-wedlock union, Hallinan lives with his second wife, a stepdaughter and Vivian, his youngest, in Upper Haight Ashbury, a racially mixed, middle-class neighborhood with many elderly and gay residents.

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Given his leftist roots, no one expected Hallinan’s first year to be uneventful. But his impetuous nature and prosecutorial inexperience, rather than his politics, are often blamed for his rocky initiation.

Associates say Hallinan has a tendency to speak without thinking about the consequences. “He has had bad PR,” said retired San Francisco Judge Jack Berman. “The bad PR is Terry doing it to himself.”

Some underlings describe their new boss as a guileless administrator who embraces change without caution. But Hallinan appears gentle and low key in person, a demeanor that belies the turmoil his tenure has brought to the district attorney’s office.

The layoffs of 18 of 118 prosecutors have left many of the lawyers crazed with insecurity, particularly when they hear Hallinan speak of his “one-strike policy” for dealing with infractions by assistant district attorneys. Unlike in Los Angeles, where jobs are protected by Civil Service, prosecutors here serve at the pleasure of the district attorney, and most of them had supported Fazio against Hallinan.

The office under Hallinan also was rocked by a sex scandal, and many blamed him for catapulting it into the headlines.

A deputy district attorney walked in on two prosecutors who appeared to have been engaging in sex on a desk in the office after going out for drinks one night. Hallinan fired the man and allowed the woman to remain. His chief of staff resigned over the incident after Hallinan publicly chided her for failing to keep him informed about the matter.

According to Hallinan, the female prosecutor had confided to his chief of staff that a co-worker had sexually assaulted her. But she refused to identify the co-worker. Hallinan said he learned about the incident only after rumors had swept the office. The male prosecutor already had been on probation for having tried to date a domestic violence victim in a case he was prosecuting, Hallinan said.

Nevertheless, many observers at the Hall of Justice thought Hallinan’s castigation of his chief assistant and the firing were excessive.

Hallinan chose as his next chief of staff his personal attorney, who had represented him in the sexual harassment case at City Hall. He spearheaded the layoffs and became despised in the office, eventually resigning to return to private practice.

Hallinan’s third chief of staff, Richard Iglehart, is, by most accounts, his best. He is a respected, veteran prosecutor from across the Bay in Alameda County, and he is working strenuously to rebuild morale. Hallinan, who had no experience managing such a large department, now delegates the day-to-day operations to his new chief and concentrates more on policy.

The periodic uproars in the office have probably diminished Hallinan’s stature among some supporters. But his views remain popular in San Francisco, a city that voted against capital punishment and the three-strikes law.

At a recent gathering of civic leaders, he received one of the strongest ovations from the public, said Chief Public Defender Peter Keane.

“I think that Hallinan is a fairly popular figure locally,” Keane said. “Over in Orange County, someone like Hallinan could not even be elected to a minor post. But the combination of things that make up Hallinan make him a colorful figure that San Franciscans seem to eat up.”

Even Joe O’Donoghue, the developer who exchanged blows with Hallinan last year, has forgiven him.

The builder made up with Hallinan a few days after their fight, over lunch arranged and attended by Mayor Brown. O’Donoghue is now firmly in Hallinan’s camp, a reflection of this city’s topsy-turvy political scene.

Hallinan, O’Donoghue said, had “a very shaky start, no question about it. . . . [But] Terry is a real nice guy personally, a down-to-earth guy,” he cooed in his Irish brogue. “There is nothing condescending about him. He is just a regular guy.”

Regular guy or not, Hallinan continues to surprise, offering some views that suggest the demands of the prosecutor’s office may be tempering his politics.

He praised a recent California Supreme Court ruling that allows cities to arrest gang members for noncriminal activities, a decision opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

“Now we can get these guys,” he said, sounding more like a prosecutor than a Hallinan.

And he does not object to a state law that allows sexual predators to be confined involuntarily in a mental institution after they have completed their sentences.

“I’m not going to want to turn that kind of person loose,” he said.

Hard-nosed when it comes to violent crime, Hallinan is less likely than his predecessors to agree to lower sentences in pretrial negotiations, said Paul Cummins, a prosecutor who heads the criminal division. Cummins said homicide convictions have risen under Hallinan.

Hallinan became the first district attorney here in decades to try a case himself, even though he had never been a prosecutor. Coached by an assistant district attorney, he mounted a zealous prosecution against the owner of a building where a balcony collapsed, killing a woman and injuring 10 other people. Hallinan charged the landlord with involuntary manslaughter, citing slipshod construction and maintenance.

A jury failed to return a felony conviction, returning with two misdemeanors. Jurors gave Hallinan’s debut mixed reviews. But the prosecution had sent a message.

“He has articulated a sense that criminal law just doesn’t pertain to poor people caught stealing or fighting with one another,” said San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Brown. “It pertains to people who have resources and commit acts against the public. That is an important statement.”

Still, Hallinan’s reign brings sniggers from other district attorneys around the state. “Only in San Francisco,” sighed one.

His style is likely to remain all his own.

Hallinan recently found himself unable to decide which of two prosecutors should get a promotion and a $10,000-a-year raise.

He called the two men into his office and told them they were both equally qualified. Then he took a quarter from his pocket.

The promotion went to the prosecutor who called “heads.”

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Profile: Terence Hallinan

The former criminal defense lawyer was elected district attorney of San Francisco in December 1995. He is serving a four-year term.

Born: Dec. 4, 1936

Education: Graduated from UC Berkeley, majoring in history; received his law degree from Hastings School of Law.

Career highlights: Elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1988 and 1992. As a private lawyer, defended mass murderer Juan Corona, briefly represented newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst and defended U.S. soldiers charged with mutiny for an antiwar sit-in at the San Francisco Presidio stockade. Also served as the West Coast chairman of the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.

Interests: Boxing fan and self-described “sports nut.” Swims three times a week and hikes.

Family: Wife Lisa is a jewelry designer; they have one daughter. He also has a stepdaughter and three other children.

Quote: “I regard this as a political as well as a legal office. . . . There are a lot of things I can do--not just convict criminals, but make this a better community.”