Free Republic

Newly elected San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin grabbed headlines earlier this week after saying he would not prosecute “quality-of-life” crimes including public urination -- but that’s only part of what’s on the agenda for the 39-year-old former public defender with a past that's radical even by California standards.

The deterioration of the City by the Bay has been tragic to watch. From the Tenderloin to Mid-Market to the Mission, open use of narcotics is commonplace, homeless encampments dominate public spaces, and human feces dot the sidewalks. The middle class has fled punishing housing costs, and neighborhoods are increasingly plagued with burglaries and property crimes. Last week San Francisco voters said, “more, please.” Weekend ballot counts clinched the election by a thin margin of far-left public defender Chesa Boudin as district attorney. Mr. Boudin has been described as part of a wave of “progressive prosecutors,” like Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner,...

Chesa Boudin, the urine-and-feces-plagued city’s incoming district attorney, pledged during the campaign not to prosecute public urination and other quality-of-life crimes if he was elected. Boudin declared victory Saturday night after results showed him winning a plurality of votes in the DA race. “We will not prosecute cases involving quality-of-life crimes. Crimes such as public camping, offering or soliciting sex, public urination, blocking a sidewalk, etc., should not and will not be prosecuted,” Boudin vowed in response to an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) questionnaire during the campaign. “Many of these crimes are still being prosecuted, we have a long way to go to decriminalize...

On Saturday, San Francisco voters elected the son of two former Weather Underground murderers to serve as their District Attorney. The voters deserve all the hell that is about to break loose. Progressive candidate Chesa Boudin wants to free criminals but prosecute police and ICE agents for doing their jobs. It's no surprise Boudin hates cops so much. His parents did, too. Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert were terrorists in the Weather Underground who murdered two police officers and a security guard during a 1981 robbery of a Brinks armored security car outside New York City. There should be a...

Chesa Boudin will serve as San Francisco's next district attorney, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Saturday. Boudin, the most progressive candidate on the ballot, won a tight race against interim district attorney Suzy Loftus. Boudin held 85,950 votes as of Saturday afternoon, with about 1,200 ballots left to count, the Chronicle said. Loftus had 83,511 votes. The 39-year-old won the seat following four days of ballot counting in the city's first open election for district attorney in over a century following sitting District Attorney George Gascon's departure to run for district attorney in Los Angeles. "We are all feeling the...

Former Weather Underground radical Kathy Boudin - who spent 22 years in prison for an armored-car robbery that killed two cops and a Brinks guard - now holds a prestigious adjunct professorship at Columbia University's School of Social Work, The Post has learned. Boudin, 69, this year won another academic laurel - being named the Sheinberg Scholar-in-Residence at NYU Law School, where last month she gave a lecture on "the politics of parole and re-entry." Boudin's bounce-back into respectability after her 2003 parole comes to light a week before the release of Robert Redford's movie "The Company You Keep,"...

Paroled Weather Underground Radical Now Columbia Professor BY: Washington Free Beacon Staff April 2, 2013 9:43 am Former Weather Underground radical Kathy Boudin, who served 22 years in prison for her role in an armored-car robbery that left three dead in 1981, now has an adjunct professorship at Columbia University’s School of Social Work, the New York Post reports: Boudin’s status of perp-turned-prof outraged the widow of one of her victims, Brinks guard and dad of three Peter Paige, who was gunned down by her accomplices from the Black Liberation Army on Oct. 20, 1981, in Rockland County.Boudin acted as...

Leonard Weinglass, an attorney who represented clients in high-profile political cases ranging from the Chicago Seven in the 1960s to the so-called Cuban Five in recent years, has died in New York City. He was 77. Colleague Michael Krinsky says Weinglass died Wednesday night of pancreatic cancer.

NEW YORK (AP) - A federal appeals court on Wednesday took a sterner stance toward the upcoming resentencing of a former civil rights lawyer convicted in a terrorism case, saying it has "serious doubts" whether her sentence of just over two years in prison was reasonable. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals added new instructions for the judge who will resentence 70-year-old Lynne Stewart, who was convicted of letting an imprisoned Egyptian terrorist client communicate with followers. The court said the judge should consider whether Stewart's sentence should be increased because of the case's terrorism connections. "We have serious...

The Post & Email has received tonight a decclassified FBI report admitted in evidence in the case brought against W. Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller by President Jimmy Carter’s U.S. Attorney General, Mr. Griffin B. Bell. This document was obtained by an American citizen, who wished to remain anonymous, via a FOIA request. Mr. W. Mark  Felt is none other than the informant who spoke with reporters from the Washington Post, exposing the Watergate Scandal:  who went by the name “Deep Throat” a fact that points to his political neutrality in American politics.What is not know about Mr. Felt...

Gringo: A Coming of Age in Latin America Author: Chesa Boudin Upcoming Schedule Sunday, May 31, at 11:15 PM - 12:00 AM ET Monday, June 1, at 4:00 AM - 5:00 AM ET About the Program Mr. Boudin is the child of former members of the Weather Underground, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert. He details his own journey through leftist politics as a young adult in Venezuela when Chavez comes to power. About the Author Chesa Boudin is a Rhodes Scholar and contributor to The Nation magazine. He is also co-author of "The Venezuelan Revolution: 100 Questions and 100 Answers."...

It’s 1981, New York City. Barack Obama is residing two blocks away from Weather Underground leader William Ayers. We know very little about Obama’s life in NYC during that period; supposedly he transferred from Occidental College and completed undergraduate studies at Columbia University. Obama’s academic records and, in fact, the records of his life from those years in New York are lost. [See references at end.] At Occidental, Obama belonged to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a radical socialist organization of which the Weather Underground was an off-shoot. Did Obama continue his SDS membership at Columbia? (I read recently...

Publisher Peter Osnos, who admits to personally working with former Bush White House press secretary Scott McClellan on his new book, What Happened, began his career as an assistant to I.F. Stone, the pro-communist "journalist" named as a Soviet agent of influence who was the uncle of Weather Underground communist terrorist Kathy Boudin. But the connections don't end there. Boudin's son Chesa was raised by Barack Obama associates Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who were Boudin's comrades in the communist terrorist group, after Kathy Boudin went to prison for her involvement in an armed robbery and assault that took the...

'The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn't make much sense.' Actually, what doesn't make much sense is how an intelligent man such as Barack Obama might not see how a relationship with Bill Ayers does in fact reflect on him and his values. Especially when Ayers' response to his "detestable acts" is simply, "I feel we didn't do enough." Oh, really? Of course, one can't blame Obama for being so surprised or offended by...

On a brisk November morning, Cathy Wilkerson strides down one of the city’s finest streets, 11th between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, her glance sweeping across the row of handsome town houses, alighting nowhere in particular. “The street I remember,” Ms. Wilkerson says, “was a lot less polished.” If streets had memories, this one would recall a far less polished incarnation of her. On the morning of March 6, 1970, Cathy Wilkerson stumbled onto 11th Street in tatters, bleeding and her clothes all but ripped off her body. Her father’s town house, 18 West 11th Street, which she had borrowed on...

Jerrold Nadler's Two Faces on Terror By Jacob LaksinFrontPageMagazine.com | June 13, 2005Last Friday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing on the Patriot Act had already been adjourned, but Jerrold Nadler, the Democratic blimpish congressman from New York and one of the leftmost members of the House Judiciary Committee, was too wound up to care: “We are not besmirching the honor of the United States, we are trying to uphold it,” bellowed the hefty Nadler. By this, Nadler meant to defend his attacks on the alleged abuses of the (in fact) privileged  prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. Thanks to the efforts of the...

An American Traitor: Guilty As Charged By Henry Mark Holzer and Erika HolzerFrontPageMagazine.com | June 10, 2005For three decades Jane Fonda obfuscated, distorted and lied about virtually everything connected with her wartime trip to North Vietnam: her motive, her acts, her intent, and her contribution to the Communists’ war effort.  With the aid of clever handlers, she so successfully suppressed and spun her conduct in Hanoi that many Americans didn’t know what she had done there, and, more important, the legal significance. Three years ago, our book, “Aid and Comfort”: Jane Fonda in North Vietnam (McFarland & Co.), laid bare...

1010 WINS) NEW YORK A former radical serving 75 years in prison for the deadly 1981 robbery of a Brinks armored truck has asked to be released from prison. She claims she was not given proper legal representation. 55-year-old Judith Clark filed a petition for habeas corpus yesterday in Federal District Court in Manhattan. Clark argues that the judge at her 1983 state trial violated the constitution when he granted Clark's request to serve as her own lawyer. Clark was convicted of three counts of second-degree murder in the 1981 armed robbery, in which a guard and two policemen were...

At Hamilton College... you can take... "Resistance Memoirs: Writing, Identity and Change."... Its teacher is Susan Rosenberg, formerly of the Weather Underground. ...Its self-described revolutionaries, mostly middle-class, dedicated themselves to supporting radical black causes and tearing apart American society in the 1970s and early 1980s. In 1970, they blew up a townhouse when a bomb detonated prematurely and killed a few of their troops. Kathy Boudin, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and other high-profile members of the group spent the next decade or so running from the police and, some of them, continuing to pursue careers in criminal violence.... So why...

Cheerleaders for TerrorismBy Erick StakelbeckFrontPageMagazine.com | June 17, 2003 Two groups whom Islamic terrorists can count on for sympathy and support are radical lawyers and their counterparts in American law schools. Lynne Stewart is a hero of the National Lawyers Guild and a sought-after campus lecturer. While out on bail under indictment for colluding with a terrorist leader, she has been a sought-after speaker for law school audiences who relish her attacks on Attorney General John Ashcroft as a modern-day fascist and on her country for its imperialist and racist policies. Stewart made national headlines in April 2002 when she...