Santa Clara County new public defender is a familiar face

Damon Silver has for months led Santa Clara County’s public defender office in an acting role. Now his title is permanent — and he’s stepping into a watershed moment for Silicon Valley’s criminal justice landscape.

The tech region’s crime-fueling wealth divide has deepened to “instability and revolt” levels, according to economists. The mayor of the county’s largest city wants to punish petty criminals more harshly. The sheriff-run county jails, where many of Silver’s indigent clients await court hearings, have been slow to improve inhumane conditions under federal consent decrees, according to federally-appointed monitors.

“I do think we’re at a really important inflection point for several reasons,” Silver told San José Spotlight.

He officially started his new title on Dec. 21, succeeding former public defender Molly O’Neal.

Silver has been a public defender for 30 years, most of it with the Santa Clara County Public Defender’s Office, trying a wide variety of felony cases, including homicides. He became the chief trial deputy in 2016 and assistant public defender in June 2017, and helped establish the office’s community outreach attorneys and the post-conviction Outreach Team. He also spearheaded a variety of the office’s race equity initiatives, and helped launch the office’s first dedicated Racial Justice Act attorney.

Silver said he’s optimistic about the future. His elected bosses, the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors, speak effusively about restorative justice — a model that favors compassion over punishment. He said that same sentiment extends to county employees under the supervisors’ purview, including County Executive James Williams. He cites the NAACP of San Jose/Silicon Valley, La Raza Roundtable, the Black Leadership Kitchen Cabinet and Silicon Valley De-Bug as key community partners.

“I think I’m going to have a lot of support and partnership, and honestly, that includes District Attorney Jeff Rosen’s office,” Silver said.

This remark might surprise people who rightly see the public defender and district attorney roles as diametrically opposed. Yet unlike other local leaders in the county, Rosen has been idiosyncratic on Silicon Valley’s key criminal punishment debates in recent years. He declined to endorse last year’s voter-approved Proposition 36, which ramped up criminal punishment for petty theft. Rosen has also taken heat for changing his stance on the death penalty, pushing to overturn — and resentence — more than a dozen death sentences handed out in the county courts.

Rosen congratulated Silver on his appointment.

“In an adversarial system like we have in court, our two offices fight hard against each other, as the system is designed to have us do,” Rosen told San José Spotlight. “I know though that outside of the court, we can and should work together to make the criminal justice system the best and the fairest it can be for all. I look forward to collaborating with Damon where we can collaborate. I also look forward to having disagreements that never lose sight of the respect we have for each other and for the justice system.”

Compare that to San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who not only supported but vigorously campaigned for Proposition 36.

Silver didn’t specifically name Mahan in his remarks,  but he criticized Proposition 36 as a reflection of local leaders focusing on singular tragic crimes or murders to push reactionary policies.

“Public safety is served when we treat people humanely and we treat their needs,” Silver said. “The jail is a non-therapeutic setting and some in our community want to advocate for it as a kind of de facto mental health facility, which it’s not.”

But Silver’s top concern is the county’s unprecedented budget crisis, which is expected to hit district attorney and public defender budgets hard — accentuating the funding imbalance between both departments.

County leaders have been grappling with a $100 million structural budget deficit in recent years. But this year, President Donald Trump’s July signing of his watershed federal spending legislation, known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” has spelled losses of $1 billion a year that will require countywide cuts to social safety net services.
The budget situation has already spelled existential threats to the county’s unique — and nationally-recognized — team of public defenders who bring legal aid to people in homeless encampments and keep poor people with mental health and drug issues from languishing in jail before their trials.

“We just haven’t seen anything like this in the 30 years I’ve been in criminal defense,” Silver said. “We’re dealing with a monumental challenge.”

Contact Brandon Pho at [email protected] or @brandonphooo on X.