Why your case is in federal court, not state court
If federal agents arrested you in San Francisco, or a grand jury in San Francisco named you in an indictment, your case will be heard in a United States district court, not a California state courthouse. The reason is one short statute, which provides:
"The district courts of the United States shall have original jurisdiction, exclusive of the courts of the States, of all offenses against the laws of the United States."
The word exclusive does the work. When the charge is a violation of federal law, no state court shares the case. The prosecution is brought by the United States Attorney's Office, the judge is a federal district judge, and sentencing runs under federal law. Our Northern District of California page maps the whole district, and our federal criminal process hub walks through each stage from arrest to sentencing.
A caution that applies to every page on this site. Penalties shown here are statutory maximums or guideline ranges, never predictions about any one person. The facts of a case change everything.
The Northern District, and why your hearing is in San Francisco
Congress drew the Northern District as one district with fifteen counties and four places to hold court, and the statute names them all. The district comprises, in the statute's words:
"The Northern District comprises the counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, Del Norte, Humboldt, Lake, Marin, Mendocino, Monterey, Napa, San Benito, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, San Mateo, and Sonoma."
And court sits in four cities:
"Court for the Northern District shall be held at Eureka, Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose."
Notice what is missing. Unlike some districts, the Northern District has no statutory divisions splitting counties into separate venues. Your papers still tell you which of the four buildings to enter, and cases filed in Oakland or San Jose stay there, as described on our Oakland page and our San Jose page. But the assignment comes from where the case was filed, not from a division boundary in the statute. Check the caption of your papers before you drive anywhere, because appearing at the wrong building on the morning of a hearing is a preventable problem.
The courthouse at 450 Golden Gate Avenue
The San Francisco home of the court is the Phillip Burton Federal Building at 450 Golden Gate Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94102. The clerk's office sits on the 16th floor and the court lists (415) 522-2000 as its number. The jury office is on the 19th floor at (415) 522-2171.
Two details on this page exist nowhere else on this site. First, the building has two public entrances, one on the Golden Gate Avenue side and one on the Turk Street side, and the court says the Turk Street entrance may be used by everyone with business before the district court, the bankruptcy court, pretrial services, probation, the federal public defender or the United States Attorney's Office, including attorneys and their clients, witnesses and jurors. Second, the hours split in a way that matters for planning. Public access to the building and the filing drop box both run 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., while the front desk is open 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. If your hearing is early in the morning and you also need the clerk's window, build your schedule around the shorter window.
Jurors get their own parking note. The court offers validated parking at the Civic Center Garage at 355 McAllister Street and tells jurors to bring the receipt to the jury office for validation, and warns against metered street parking because there will be no time during the day to feed the meter.
Getting through the door on your court date
Plan for a federal building, not an ordinary errand downtown. Bring a photo ID and every page of the summons, indictment or notice you received, and arrive early enough to clear screening with time left to find your courtroom. Weapons, cameras and recording devices are restricted in federal courthouses, so leave anything questionable behind. Civic Center parking is slow at peak hours, so check your route the night before rather than assuming street parking near Golden Gate Avenue will cooperate. If you were arrested and released with a date to appear, read our page on federal arrest before that date so the first appearance does not surprise you.
Who prosecutes a San Francisco federal case
The court and the prosecution are separate. The judge decides motions, runs the trial and imposes sentence. The charges are brought by the United States Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California, whose district stretches from Del Norte County in the north to Monterey County in the south. The office describes three major metro areas in San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, an expanse of suburban and rural country, more than 300 public companies centered on Silicon Valley, and nearly nine million people living and working in the district. The agents who investigated the case usually report into the same district. No attorney, judge, prosecutor or client is named anywhere on this page, and that is deliberate. What matters is the office and the process, not any one person.
What happens first, and what comes after
The first decisions in a federal case come fast. At the first appearance the judge addresses release, and detention fights are litigated under the standards explained on our detention hearings page. If the case proceeds by indictment, read our indictment page. Sentencing, if it comes to that, runs under federal law described on our federal sentencing page. And if the trial court gets the law wrong, the appeal goes to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the circuit Congress assigned to California, since the courts of appeals "shall have jurisdiction of appeals from all final decisions of the district courts of the United States." Appeals run on strict deadlines measured from the judgment, so read our federal appeals page early rather than after time has run.