Grand Marshal

The Northern California Cherry Blossom Festival has announced that Jeff Adachi, public defender for the City and County of San Francisco, will be the grand marshal at the 2010 Northern California Cherry Blossom Festival parade on April 18, 2010.

Adachi is California’s only publicly elected public defender; before being elected in March 2002, Adachi worked as a deputy public defender in San Francisco for 15 years and in private practice for two years. He is a past president of the Asian American Bar Association of the Greater Bay Area and the San Francisco Japanese American Citizen’s League.

From 1998 to 2001, he served as the chief attorney of the office.

He has tried over 100 jury trials, including numerous serious felony and homicide cases, and has handled over 3,000 criminal matters throughout his career, including some of the Bay Area’s highest-profile cases.

As the only elected public defender in California and one of only a few in the U.S., Adachi oversees an office of 93 lawyers and 60 support staff. Each year, the office represents over 23,000 people who are charged with misdemeanor and felony offenses.

The office has a $24 million budget, and provides a panoply of innovative programs to its clients, including Drug Court, Clean Slate expungement services, and a full-service Juvenile Division. The office also has one of the country’s top intern programs for law students and graduates.

Adachi served on the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Legal Aid and Indigents and is a member of the National Board of Trial Advocacy. He is the co-author of Chapter 25: Immunity for Testimony, in the California Criminal Law Procedure and Practice book, and a past board member of the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice and the San Francisco Bar Association.

He is a past president of the Asian American Bar Association of the Greater Bay Area (AABA) and the San Francisco Japanese American Citizens League. He has been a certified criminal law specialist since 1991. Adachi has also taught with BAR/BRI bar review for 15 years and has published five books in this area.

Adachi received the California State Bar Association’s Hufstedler Award for public service in 1992, AABA’s Joe Morozumi Award for exceptional legal advocacy in 1997, and the Mayor’s Fiscal Advisory Committee’s Managerial Excellence Award in 2000, and was honored by the Asian American Bar Association of the Silicon Valley in 2003.

In 2006, Adachi was given the California Public Defender Association’s Program of the Year Award, and the American Bar Association’s national award for excellence in public defense. The following year, he was the recipient of the prestigious California Lawyer Attorney of the Year award (CLAY) for his work in the field of prisoner re-entry.

Adachi was featured in a PBS documentary, “Presumed Guilty: Tales of the Public Defenders,” and produced two documentaries, “The Slanted Screen,” a look at Hollywood’s portrayals of Asian men, and “You Don’t Know Jack,” a profile of the late actor Jack Soo. He also created the Golden Ring Awards, which recognized achievements by Asian Americans in the arts.

Adachi graduated from Hastings College of the Law in 1985 and attended undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley. He lives in San Francisco with his wife Mutsuko and daughter Lauren.