[Brown Deer]

An Unusual Court Nominee, Judging by His Family

His father, Leonard, like his great-uncle, Louis, was a prominent civil liberties lawyer. His uncle, I. F. Stone, was a legendary liberal muckraker. His sister and only sibling, Kathy, was a militant leftist who is now serving 20 years in prison for the murders of a Brink's guard and two policemen during an armed robbery that was to finance her revolutionary activities.

[Brown Deer]

He was 14 months old when his parents, who were members of the far-left Weather Underground, dropped him off with a babysitter and took part in an armored car robbery in upstate New York that left two police officers and a security guard dead. His mother, Kathy Boudin, served 22 years behind bars and his father, David Gilbert, may spend the rest of his life in prison.

"Growing up, I had to go through a metal detector and steel gates just to give my parents a hug," Boudin said in his campaign video.

He said that as one of the dozens of people whose lives were shattered by the deadly robbery in 1981, he experienced first-hand the destructive effects of mass incarceration and it motivated him to reform the nation's broken criminal justice system.

He was raised in Chicago by Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn before studying law at Yale University. He later won a Rhodes Scholarship and worked as a translator for Venezuela's late President Hugo Chavez before coming to San Francisco.