Chesa Boudin is an American lawyer who served as the 29th District Attorney of San Francisco from January 8, 2020 to July 8, 2022. He is a member of the Democratic Party.
Boudin graduated from Yale University and was a Rhodes Scholar at St Antony's College, Oxford. After obtaining his Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 2011, Boudin served as a law clerk to M. Margaret McKeown on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He went on to work at the San Francisco Public Defender's Office as a post-doctoral fellow in 2012. Boudin clerked for Charles Breyer on the United States District Court for the Northern District of California from 2013 and 2014 before returning to San Francisco as a deputy public defender.
Elected as San Francisco district attorney in 2019, Boudin implemented some criminal justice reform policies to reduce incarceration, including bail reform and alternatives to prosecution and sentencing. However, he was heavily criticized for mismanagement of the office and for his perceived softness on crime, and was the subject of a recall election on June 7, 2022; 55% of voters chose to remove him from office. Brooke Jenkins, who was a leading figure and critic of Boudin in the recall election, was chosen by Mayor London Breed to succeed him as interim District Attorney. She would go on to win a special election to complete Boudin's unexpired term. Boudin is the first district attorney in San Francisco to be recalled, and the first district attorney in the state of California to be successfully removed from office.
