The San Francisco district attorney’s office is looking to change California’s constitution, after a recent state Supreme Court decision made it harder for the office to hold people charged with low-level offenses in jail before trial, DA Brooke Jenkins said on Tuesday morning.
Since the April 2026 ruling, In re Kowalczyk, judges must find that defendants fall within the state constitution’s limited definition of a “no-bail” case. The latter applies primarily to violent crimes and is the bar for holding suspects in jail while awaiting trial. Before that ruling, a defendant could be detained for a number of other reasons, including previous failures to appear in court.
The result has been far fewer people in jail — San Francisco on Saturday recorded its lowest jail population in three years — and many more pretrial releases…