Sacramento DA brought domestic charges against cop after S.F. filed a case. What happened?
A case involving a former Sacramento police officer accused of abusing and threatening his girlfriend has brought renewed attention to the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office at a time its elected leader is running for attorney general.
The case – involving former officer Justin Shepard – was raised in a San Francisco Examiner column last month against the backdrop of longtime Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert running on a tough-on-crime platform to be the state’s next top cop.
Shepard was charged by San Francisco prosecutors in August 2021 in connection with domestic violence allegations.
Those charges came after Schubert’s office initially declined to bring charges, citing insufficient evidence, for a May 2021 incident involving similar allegations against Shepard. Schubert’s office later brought a case against Shepard.
Schubert has frequently criticized San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin – who is facing a recall – and likened incumbent Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat who is also running to be the state’s top cop, to progressive district attorneys like Boudin and George Gascón, of Los Angeles.
“In San Francisco you have a district attorney, former public defender, who is letting violent criminals out with little oversight or consequences,” Schubert said during an announcement of her campaign for attorney general in April 2021. “Criminals who go on to victimize again.”
Critics and opposing campaigns, meanwhile, have seized on the Shepard case and crime trends in Sacramento to attack Schubert.
Eric Early, one of two Republicans running for attorney general, told the San Francisco Examiner he is no fan of Boudin or Gascón, saying both should be recalled, and added: “Schubert shouldn’t be hiding behind those two because her record is perhaps at least as bad as both their records.”
Sacramento DA filed case after S.F.
Shepard was initially arrested in May 2021 in connection with an alleged domestic violence incident in Natomas. At the time, the Sacramento Police Department said that the victim showed visible signs of injury from the attack. But prosecutors with Schubert’s office a month later declined to file charges against Shepard, saying they didn’t have sufficient evidence to file a criminal complaint.
Then, in August 2021, Boudin’s office brought charges against Shepard in connection with a domestic violence incident in San Francisco that month.
Later that month, Sacramento prosecutors reversed course and filed charges in connection with the initial May 2021 incident.
Schubert’s campaign referred a request for comment on the case to the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office. Shepard’s attorney declined to comment for this story.
Through a spokeswoman, Assistant Chief Deputy District Attorney Dawn Bladet said in an email Monday that, in general, “if a victim of domestic violence refuses to participate as a witness in a case and the case cannot be proven with other admissible evidence, there may not be sufficient evidence for a domestic violence case to move forward.”
“Contrary to the suggestion of the chronology of events, the decision of the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office to file charges against Justin Shepard on August 31, 2021, had nothing to do with San Francisco’s filing decision, but rather consideration of new information received by law enforcement during the course of investigating that incident which then provided sufficient evidence to support the filing of charges in the Sacramento matter,” Bladet wrote.
She also pointed to a statement released by Shepard’s attorney in May 2021 that said, in part, that “the complainant fully recanted her allegations of domestic violence” against Shepard.
“We are ethically bound not to respond in kind with reference to the confidential investigative reports that guided our deliberative process in the filing of charges against Justin Shepard,” Bladet wrote. “These rules are in place to protect the integrity of the justice system and the defendant’s due process rights.”
This story was originally published May 11, 2022 at 5:00 AM.