Terence Hallinan

Delinquency History: Spent time in San Francisco's juvenile hall, and the Marin County jail for fighting and assault. Adult convictions for civil disobedience.

In his three years as District Attorney of San Francisco, Terence Hallinan has used his passion for justice and his personal understanding of juvenile delinquency to hold San Francisco's delinquent youth accountable and make sure they have a chance at rehabilitation. During his tenure as DA, he has diverted more delinquent youth into rigorous counseling and supervision services, and increased the use of early intervention in the belief that it is important to help young people who have gotten into trouble to turn their lives around, like he was able to do.

The results thus far have been impressive. The violent juvenile crime rate in San Francisco dropped by 13% during Hallinan's first year as DA, more than twice the decline in juvenile violence experienced by the rest of the state that year.

Ironically, in 1966, Hallinan was actually refused admission to the California Bar, based at least partially on his youthful misbehavior. At the time, the Bar wrote "this Committee does hereby refuse to certify the applicant to the Supreme Court of California for admission and license to practice law because said applicant does not satisfy the requirement... that he be of good moral character."

Originally, when the Bar Association Sub-Committee reviewed Hallinan's application, it denied him based solely on his arrests for civil disobedience during the civil rights movement. It was only later, when the full Bar reviewed his application, that they added his juvenile arrests for fighting as a reason to find him "morally unfit." To this day, Hallinan opines that his juvenile charges were added as a smoke screen to mask the Bar's obvious disapproval of his non-violent organizing in support of the civil rights movement. It would take a six-to-one decision of the California Supreme Court to allow Hallinan to practice law and ultimately occupy the office which prosecuted him on several occasions.

"There was a lot of hostility directed towards our family during that period. . . . And we returned it, in kind."

Terence Hallinan was born on December 4, 1936, the second of six sons born to Vincent and Vivian Hallinan. Vincent Hallinan was both loved and loathed in the San Francisco Bay Area as a fighter for progressive causes. His left-leaning tendencies brought him and his family under considerable legal and community pressures.

When Terence Hallinan was in the third grade, his family moved from the more tolerant confines of San Francisco to a more affluent and conservative community in Marin County, California. Terence remembers the constant harassment he and his brothers were subjected to, including being called communists and having a hammer and sickle spray-painted on their home.

"The whole country was moving right at that time, and my father moved left," he recalls.

In its description of Vivian Hallinan's testimony, the California Supreme Court gave a surprisingly poignant recitation of the pressures Hallinan was under during his adolescence: "...[I]t appears to be her feeling that the primary causes of her son's bellicosity lay in certain unique developments during the period of his adolescence. During this period, petitioner's father, a prominent attorney, was becoming an increasingly controversial, if not a notorious figure in the community, as a result of his widely publicized and unorthodox political views (among other things, he ran for President as the candidate of the Independent Progressive Party) and his outspoken defense of various unpopular causes and individuals. Because of the controversy surrounding his father, petitioner experienced 'social ostracism and isolation and unpopularity' while a student in grammar school. Occasionally, he and his brothers were physically abused by older boys because of the political views associated with the Hallinan family. Petitioner testified for example, that one older brother was badly beaten up by three marines "because of our opposition to the Korean War." At this point, petitioner's father gave his sons formal instruction and training in boxing. According to his wife, petitioner's father believed that, "if you are going to hold radical opinions, you have to be able to fight." According to Mrs. Hallinan, petitioner initially resisted the importuning of his father that he learn to fight. Once he reconciled himself to the alleged necessity, however, the training provided by his father converted petitioner into a formidable opponentȃas is attested...by the name by which he is regularly known: "Kayo Hallinan."

After Hallinan's older brother, Patrick, was badly beaten up by a group of Marines, Vincent Hallinan built a boxing ring in his basement and got a boxing coach to school his sons. Tony Curro, himself a former welter-weight boxer, did such a good job with the Hallinan boys that the first five of them became boxing champs at U.C. Berkeley.

"If his juvenile record had been forwarded to U.C. Berkeley or Hastings when he was applying for admission, Hallinan says, "I guess I'd be a Longshoreman now."

"There was a lot of hostility directed toward our family during that period," Hallinan relates, with the difficulty of that time still obviously fresh in his mind. "And we returned it in kind."

Hallinan grew to adolescence in the late 1940s. As the Cold War heated up, the pressure on his family increased. When Hallinan was 14 years old, Vincent Hallinan was sent to the Federal Prison at McNeil Island for six months for contempt of court arising out of his defense of famed labor leader and founder of the Longshoreman's union—Harry Bridges. During most of Hallinan's adolescence, Vincent and Vivian Hallinan were defending themselves from one or another indictment. When Hallinan was age 16, his father was again sent to McNeil Island, this time for two years.

"My father never stopped organizing, even in prison," Hallinan laughs. "While he was at McNeil Island, he became the head of the prison grievance committee and got the dining hall desegregated."

The violent juvenile crime rate in San Francisco dropped by 13% during Hallinan's first year as DA, more than twice the decline in juvenile violence experienced by the rest of the state.

But Hallinan gets more serious when he talks about the impact his father's imprisonment had on him during his formative years. "It was hard to grow up with that much pressure and not have your father around to help you through it."

As a result, Hallinan began to fight, like he was taught to do.

As a youth, Terence Hallinan had numerous fighting-related scrapes with the law, and he saw the inside of both Marin County's and San Francisco's juvenile hall on several occasions. Eventually, when he was age 17, one of those fights got him kicked out of Drake High School in San Rafael, and made a ward of the juvenile court. The juvenile court judge ordered young Hallinan removed from Marin County for a period of one year, allowing him to return home from Friday night to Sunday evening to visit his family.

"My father got me a job as a warehouseman in Sacramento, I got my own place, and worked a nine-to-five job," Hallinan remembers. "It was good for me, in a lot of ways. It got me away from the bad chemistry in my home neighborhood, and allowed me to start over and make it on my own."

Hallinan notes with obvious pride that not only was he supporting himself on his wages at this time, but that he quickly saved up enough money to buy his parents the first television set the family had ever owned.

After his "year of exile," Terence Hallinan moved to San Francisco and graduated from Drew High School. He then worked in Hawaii as a laborer and clerk for the Longshoreman's Union for a year.

Upon his return to California, Hallinan entered the University of California at Berkeley. There, he joined the University's boxing team, coming within two fights of making the 1960 U.S. Olympics team as a middleweight.

After graduating from U.C. Berkeley, Hallinan attended the famed London School of Economics. While in London, he met philosopher Lord Bertrand Russell, then part of the opposition to America's involvement in the Vietnam War. Hallinan attended a peace demonstration in front of the American Embassy, where he experienced his first civil disobedience arrest for "blocking a footpath." He was fined one pound.

Upon Hallinan's return to America and entrance into Hastings School of Law, his interest in the anti-war and civil rights movements grew. He became a member of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and was arrested several times in Mississippi attempting to register African-Americans to vote.

"The police really hated us down there in Mississippi," Hallinan remembered.

"When they got the white kids in jail, they beat us up even worse than they beat up the black kids."

When he returned to San Francisco, Hallinan became a member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Ad Hoc Committee to End Racial Discrimination, and was one of the founders of San Francisco's W.E.B. DuBois Club. Hallinan was active in organizing sit-ins of numerous San Francisco businesses which, at the time, had no African American employees. These included the Sheraton Palace, Mel's Drive-in, and a Cadillac dealership on San Francisco's "Auto Row."

In total, Terence Hallinan was arrested 19 times during law school for his involvement in peaceful, civil-rights demonstrations. On one occasion, after protesting at the Sheraton Palace, Hallinan was actually jailed at the same time as his mother and older brother, Patrick.

The California Supreme Court's precedent-setting decision allowed Hallinan to serve in the profession he had worked so hard to enter about two years after the rest of his class had begun to practice law. In an almost triumphantly-worded decision, the Court wrote "After reading the entire record, and exercising our independent judgment as to the weight of the evidence, we find that the conclusion of the Committee of Bar Examiners that petitioner does not possess the good moral character required of applicants for admission to the bar is not justified by the record, and to the contrary we find that the record demonstrates that petitioner possesses such character. This being so, being qualified in all respects, petitioner is entitled to be admitted to practice law."

After being admitted to the Bar, Hallinan practiced law as a defense attorney for over 20 years before being elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He was elected District Attorney of San Francisco in 1995.

Towards the end of the interview in his office adorned with pictures of his civil rights activities, Hallinan discussed recent legislation that would abolish confidentiality protections for juveniles and, in some cases, forward their juvenile arrest records to colleges to which they are applying for admission. When asked what the implications would have been for him if his juvenile record had been forwarded to U.C. Berkeley or Hastings when he was applying for admission, Hallinan replied, "I guess I'd be a Longshoreman now."