Shamann Walton
speaker
1,286 appearances
21 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 1 Sep
Shamann Walton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 21 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 5.
Appearances
Patty is retiring from the San Francisco Public Defender's Office after 49 years of service to public defender clients in the city and county of San Francisco.
Patty was born and raised in San Francisco.
She moved from Chinatown to the Richmond District as a child, at a time when there were no other Chinese families in that community.
Her grandfather opened a store in Chinatown, and her father came over through Angel Island at age four.
Patty attended San Francisco public schools, Lafayette Elementary, Presidio Middle School, where she was the school's second ever girl president, and Washington High School.
She chose to become a public defender because she saw the system was broken and saw how that broken system impacted people close to her.
Patty started at the downtown office at the Hall of Justice.
Five years later, she was asked to join the juvenile unit, and that's where she found her life's work.
She began representing young clients in 1981 and went on to lead the youth defender unit, formerly the juvenile unit.
As managing attorney for over 30 years, under her leadership, San Francisco nearly eliminated state institutional commitments for youth.
through her work developing and promoting social work services and defense based disposition reports as alternatives to incarceration.
More recently, Patty became assistant chief public defender overseeing the office's defend division, which includes representation in adult, juvenile, immigration, post-conviction and mental health cases.
In recent years,
Patty's leadership was central to the fight to close San Francisco's Juvenile Hall, which remains the office's North Star and hers.
Patty has been a regional and national leader in this work, co-director of the Pacific Juvenile Defender Center, appointed to Obama's Science Advisory Board on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, and a member of the Judicial Council's Family and Law Advisory Committee.
the Center for Families, Children in the Courts, and the MacArthur Research Network in Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice.
She serves on the boards of the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice and the East Bay Children's Law Offices.
For the past eight years, she's organized and facilitated quarterly meetings of California's leading juvenile justice advocacy groups.
work that has driven major policy wins, reducing the state's youth incarceration rate.
Her honors include the San Francisco Modern Day Abolitionist Award, the Pacific Asian American Women Bay Area's Coalition Woman Warrior Award, the National Juvenile Defender Center Leadership Award, the Pacific Juvenile Defender of the Year Award, and the California Wellness Foundation Peace Prize.
Showing 441–460 of 1,286 · page 23 of 65
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