Jeffrey Gordon Adachi (August 29, 1959 – February 22, 2019) was an American attorney, pension reform advocate, and politician who served as the Public Defender of San Francisco from 2003 to 2019.

[2] Adachi was a notably poor student at C. K. McClatchy High School accruing numerous absences due to the many hours he spent working at his part-time jobs.

He attended Sacramento City College before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley where, in 1981, he received his bachelor’s degree.

[3] In 2001, Kimiko Burton-Cruz, the daughter of then State Senator John Burton, was appointed Public Defender by Mayor Willie Brown.

Adachi was featured in the 2002 PBS documentary Presumed Guilty, a film about the San Francisco Public Defender's Office, its difficult cases, and complex defense strategies.

Adachi was the only elected Public Defender in the state of California and ran an office of more than 100 attorneys and 60 staff members.

The office was known for several innovative criminal justice programs including Drug Court, Clean Slate expungement services, and a full-service juvenile division.

[14] Adachi was previously the president of the Asian American Bar Association of the Greater Bay Area and the San Francisco Japanese American Citizen's League, in addition to serving as a board member of the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice and the San Francisco Bar Association.

[3] At the national level, Adachi was a member of the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Legal Aid and Indigents.

In 2010, Adachi placed "Proposition B" on the ballot, which would have required employees to increase the level of their contribution to defray the cost of both their pension and health care benefits.

After filing his papers Adachi stated, "I've decided to run for Mayor of San Francisco to restore integrity and financial accountability to the city."

He's been unfairly vilified by much of the city's political establishment for daring to raise the pension problem that others preferred to ignore.

Adachi wrote, produced, and directed The Slanted Screen, a 2006 documentary film about stereotypical depictions of Asian males in American cinema.

Though the autopsy report noted "trace" amounts of cocaine and alcohol in his system and claimed their effects on his already diseased heart was the cause of death[36][37][38][39] Dr. Dylan V. Miller, an expert in cardiovascular and autopsy pathology, Dr. Nikolas Lemos, a forensic toxicologist, and James L. Norris, a consultant in forensic science determined the sample used in the toxicology report relied upon by Wirowek was “unreliable” and that far from being the cause of death, the amounts of alcohol, cocaine, as well as benzodiazepines found in Adachi's system were “toxicologically insignificant.”[40] In other words, an independent autopsy came to a different conclusion, determining Adachi's death to have been caused by natural causes, rather than an accident.

Specifically, the independent autopsy concluded that Adachi's death was caused by a "sudden cardiac arrhythmia and acute myocardial infraction (sic) due to [a] coronary artery disease.

"[41][42][40] This conclusion was supported by the president of the American Academy of Emergency Medicine, Dr. David Farcy, who reviewed Adachi’s autopsy at the request of a local news outlet.