On strike: Sacramento County’s criminal attorneys walk off the job. What are their demands?
Hundreds of Sacramento County’s criminal attorneys walked off the job at one of the state’s busiest courthouses Monday morning, 10 days after telling county leaders they would take their demands to the picket line.
Hoisting bold black-and-white signs declaring Sacramento County “unfair,” and chanting “Overworked and underpaid/County better get that raise,” county deputy prosecutors and public defenders crowded the steps outside the Gordon D. Schaber Courthouse in downtown Sacramento.
“We fight for victims and for public safety. It makes us sick being here on the street instead of the courtroom,” Matt Chisholm, president of the Sacramento County Attorneys’ Association, and a lead trial attorney in the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office, said, surrounded by striking attorneys. “Put us back in the courtroom working on our vital mission.”
Sacramento public sector attorneys — about 150 criminal prosecutors, 100 deputy public defenders and a handful of attorneys in child support services — said they have been working without a contract since their last labor pact ended in 2022. Their walkout will go through Friday, Chisholm said.
Sacramento County says a December 2022 memorandum of understanding signed by the county and the attorneys’ union extended the contract through June 2025, according to Janna Hayes, a Sacramento County spokesperson. Meantime, the sides were to continue to hash out equity pay increases and retroactive pay, the 2022 memo read.
“We dedicate our lives to defend the most vulnerable among us: the indigent, the marginalized and those who are often left without a voice in our legal system,” said Quoc To, union leader and a senior Sacramento County deputy public defender. “Today, we are forced to stand up for our own rights.”
The contract dispute that led to the walkout is months in the making. Rank-and-file prosecutors and public defenders want at least a 5.5% pay increase plus retroactive pay to make up for the months lost in approving a prior contract.
They say low pay has turned their overworked offices into revolving doors. Mid-level and senior attorneys are increasingly heading to neighboring counties with higher pay and lighter caseloads, they said, leaving work to less-experienced lawyers.
But advocates for Sacramento’s incarcerated and indigent want assurances that inmates’ rights aren’t being lost in the demands for better pay, saying that with the stoppage, “people’s lives are being used as leverage.”
The advocacy estimates more than 80% of Sacramento County’s jail population is awaiting trial in Sacramento Superior Court.
“Little attention has been paid to the strike’s impact on mostly low-income Black and Brown people incarcerated in Sacramento County’s jails who are awaiting their constitutional rights,” said the advocacy group Decarcerate Sacramento.
“We are long-time advocates for increased funding to the Public Defender’s Office, but not at the expense of someone else’s life, liberty and constitutional rights,” Decarcerate Sacramento officials said in the statement. “It is not reasonable to ask fellow defense attorneys to sacrifice people’s lives as a form of solidarity.”
Decarcerate Sacramento said the county’s conflict criminal attorneys — those who take on public defenders’ cases when conflicts of interest arise — are picking up cases while the county prosecutors and defenders are on the picket line.
Looking on at the morning protest was Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho. The county’s top prosecutor has publicly supported the attorneys’ demands for higher pay.
What the work stoppage will mean for court operations in the near term has yet to be tested, but both Ho and leaders at the Sacramento County Attorneys’ Association, the union that represents the public sector attorneys, said contingencies are in place to keep operations moving.
“What I can tell the community is this: Public safety will not be impacted during this week,” Ho said, adding he and other attorneys will be handling matters in the downtown courthouse throughout the week during the expected walkout, “to make sure the fair administration of justice continues forward and that the public is protected.”
Attorneys engaged in jury trials and preliminary hearings — hearings to determine whether cases move to trial — will stay on the job.
Lawyers assigned to state hospital and other conservatorship cases will also continue to work. Attorneys will also continue to staff juvenile court hearings, said To.
Ho, a decorated prosecutor in the Sacramento office before his election to D.A. in late 2022, and a veteran of the last attorneys’ strike in 2006, said he and his counterpart public defenders are losing seasoned professionals to other counties.
“I do support the district attorneys and the public defenders obtaining fair wages,” Ho said. “I have an issue with retaining and recruiting experienced attorneys and I’m losing them to other jurisdictions,” he added, calling on Sacramento County chief executive David Villanueva to “step forward and help resolve this situation.”
But Sacramento County officials say the two sides had a deal in place through June 2025 that met the attorneys’ demands that included “significant increases in compensation” ranging from 14% to 15% raises and back pay.
Attorneys loudly disputed that on the courthouse steps Monday, but Sacramento County officials held firm, calling its compensation packages for attorneys “competitive and generous.”
“With top-step annual salaries for our attorneys reaching $247,000 for principal attorneys, $225,000 for Level V, and $204,000 for Level IV — well above market averages, even when considering higher-cost areas — our compensation packages, including pensions and benefits, are competitive and generous,” county officials said.
County officials said the attorneys want the 5.5% raise on top of the offered increases. Officials who had reacted with “deep disappointment” at the news of a pending walkout, called the additional proposed pay raises “counterintuitive.”
“A 19.5 to 20.5% compensation increase, as opposed to the 14-15% provided as part of the current extension, for one of the county’s highest-paid staff, who also have the lowest vacancy rate, appears counterintuitive given that market data does not support such a raise,” the county said.
This story was originally published August 26, 2024 at 2:36 PM.
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