Alameda County DA Pamela Price vows changes as hundreds of misdemeanor cases languish past statute of limitations

OAKLAND — Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price announced plans Wednesday to address a mounting backlog of cases that caused hundreds of misdemeanor cases to languish past the statute of limitations and imperiled thousands of other prosecutions across Oakland and northern Alameda County.

Price she struck a defiant tone at a Wednesday press conference and blamed outdated technology and her predecessor for the buildup of cases at Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse in downtown Oakland. In doing so, she vowed transparency with crime victims whose cases may have been affected by the backlog.

“Certainty we will make every effort to notify people on what happened to their case,” the district attorney said.

Price’s criticisms drew an immediate rebuke from former District Attorney Nancy O’Malley, who maintained that “filing charges on time was never, ever an issue when I was the DA.”

As of Oct. 2, more than 1,000 cases at the courthouse appeared to have languished past the state’s one-year statute of limitations for misdemeanor cases. The courthouse is the entry point for cases presented to the district attorney’s office by police departments across northern and western Alameda County, including Oakland, Berkeley, Albany and Emeryville.

Of that total, 360 cases had been reviewed by a prosecutor at the district attorney’s office, and were determined at that time to have run past the statute of limitations, according to data provided to this newspaper by a current employee of the district attorney’s office on the condition of anonymity, amid concerns of retaliation.

Another 646 misdemeanor cases appeared to have already eclipsed the one-year statute of limitations as of Oct. 2, but had yet to be formally reviewed by a prosecutor, the data showed.

In all, more than 4,000 misdemeanor and felony cases had been presented to the district attorney’s office as of mid-September, but had yet to be reviewed by any prosecutors for a decision on whether to file charges.

The backlog was first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.

Price on Wednesday declined to confirm any figures, saying that doing so would require someone in her office to manually hand-count files.

The district attorney said she was first made aware of the backlog of misdemeanor cases at the downtown Oakland courthouse in July, and that her office began implementing a fix in August. Additional prosecutors have been ordered to help handle the mounting caseload, with the number of people assigned to that task growing from at least two prosecutors to a total of six, she said.

Price also ordered three additional people to help download cases presented to her office by law enforcement agencies — a process that, she said, contributed to the backlog.

The district attorney stressed the office’s case management system had “no mechanism or process by which the date of the incident is actually recorded,” leaving her staff with no way to easily track when cases may be at risk of running past the statute of limitations.

In detailing the backlog, Price blamed O’Malley for having created the conditions for the backlog to metastasize at the Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse. She added that ensuring cases don’t run past the statute of limitations was a “fundamental responsibility of lawyers.”

“The fact that it has never been emphasized in this office is a problem I’ve walked into, I’ve learned about and I’m now fixing,” Price said.

O’Malley fired back Wednesday evening, emphasizing that she always made sure to properly staff the courthouse with enough prosecutors to prevent any similar backlog from forming during her tenure. As many as nine prosecutors had been assigned to review cases at the courthouse during her years as DA, she said.

“She needs to stop blaming everybody else for the problems that are in that office,” O’Malley said.

On Wednesday, Price’s chief of prosecutors, Evanthia Pappas, said she discovered a similar backlog of unreviewed cases in April 2023 at the Family Justice Center, which handles domestic violence, elder abuse, child abuse and human trafficking cases. Specifically, 587 domestic violence cases had languished beyond the statute of limitations, Pappas said.

Price has repeatedly complained about the record-keeping and case management systems that the office was using when she took office in January 2023, claiming that she inherited a “hot mess” from the previous administration. She has cited those record-keeping systems as reasons for having not released detailed data on charging decisions by O’Malley, suggesting that a public dashboard could be available in January 2025.

The first-term district attorney has found herself in a pitched battle to remain in office barely a third of the way into her six-year term, with voters set to decide whether to recall the former civil rights attorney during the Nov. 5 election.

Jakob Rodgers is a senior breaking news reporter. Call, text or send him an encrypted message via Signal at 510-390-2351, or email him at jrodgers@bayareanewsgroup.com.