California county drops hundreds of misdemeanor cases after not prosecuting suspects in time

Alameda County, CA has dropped hundreds of misdemeanor charges because the suspects weren’t prosecuted in a timely manner.

Staff in Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price’s office told the San Francisco Chronicle that the old cases have kept piling up since Price became the DA in January 2023. She is now fighting a recall effort. Price blames the backlog on cases they inherited from the previous DA, Nancy O’Malley, who has said that accusation is not true.

According to the Chronicle’s investigation, there are now more than 1,000 misdemeanor criminal cases in Price’s files that have expired due to the statute of limitations. Of these, there are over 600 cases that have passed their due date but are technically still pending but likely to be thrown out, and 360 that have been officially declined  - all are over a year old.

Of the misdemeanor criminal cases, one involves an accused drunk driver with a 0.22 BAC who careened into three parked cars; another concerns a man who allegedly tried to return around $800 in merchandise to a Home Depot that he had never purchased; and the third involves a woman that police discovered in a stolen car and carrying brass knuckles.

All of these cases meant police had to file a report or misdemeanor citation with the DA’s office. The DA is then supposed to make a decision about whether to charge the individuals, and for what – but they must do so within a year.

Even though staffers told the Chronicle that more than 1,000 cases are now history, Price wasn’t owning up to any specific numbers and used the traditional response of not being able "to confirm or deny" the number. The Chronicle was able to cross-reference other city data to confirm the number.

Price’s former staffers said the case backlog began just as Price occupied the DA’s office. There could be even more expired cases because the information gleaned by the Chronicle is not representative of all misdemeanor police reports submitted to the DA’s office, only those provided to prosecutors at Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse in Oakland. It does not include reports from smaller county courthouses nor does it encompass domestic violence cases.