The $40,000 in allegedly stolen merchandise from Target is just one of the many SF shoplifting cases against Aziza Graves, who is not in jail, but instead back in court for hearings that have dragged on for nearly two and half years.  

It was way back in November 2021 when we first heard about mind-boggling mass shoplifting allegations against San Francisco woman Aziza Graves, who at that point was accused of 128 counts of theft for stealing $40,000 of merchandise from the Stonestown Target. (She would allegedly go to the self-checkout, pay $1, or even one cent, and just walk off with the rest of the stuff.) Then-DA Chesa Boudin wanted her locked up, but a judge let her go, and she was arrested again less than a month later for shoplifting at the Westfield Centre.  

Fast forward to now two and half years later, and KGO reports that Graves is still on the streets as her trials inch forward. The KGO I-Team segment above details the length of these criminal proceedings, speaks to DA Brooke Jenkins about how on earth this notorious serial shoplifting suspect is still free, and even gets some degree of comment out of Graves herself.

The segment does push DA Jenkins’s narrative that Boudin was too soft on crime, though the supposedly tougher-on-crime Jenkins is getting the exact same result with Graves’s case, but these days it’s somehow all the judge’s fault instead of the DA’s fault.

“There are judges who will offer their own plea bargain to defendants of ours, they have the ability to do that,” Jenkins told KGO. "We're having that happen in a case right now involving a repeat offender of theft."

Jenkins was referring to Graves’s case.

KGO also tried to get comment from Graves herself, who is apparently homeless, during one of her “more than two dozen” court appearances. At one point she appears ready to give comment, but it seems her offscreen public defender (wisely) discourages this, and she cuts it off by saying “I don’t want to do this, this is stupid.”

But she did respond to a KGO email request, in which she maintained her innocence. But she did so in terms that, well, maybe do not sound like the views of a stable person.

"The machine said payment complete after putting in just one cent,” Graves reportedly wrote. “I had to figure out how one cent could equal 100%." She also added, "the actual value of what we call a penny is .000001 credits or $100 million."

The judge in Graves’s case, Brendan Conroy, recently offered Graves a plea deal where she could get 138 theft counts reduced to one grand theft charge, with a two-year sentence and credit for time already served. Prosecutors argued this was too lenient, the public defender argued it was too harsh, but that’s how attorneys operate. The plea deal was apparently accepted.

But that plea deal “fell through,” according to KGO, though there’s no information on how or why it fell through. And so Graves is back in court today for another hearing, nearly two and half years after her initial arrest, and she has reportedly racked up many other shoplifting charges since.

Related: Thief In Viral Video at SF Walgreens Arrested After Attempting to Steal Again [SFist]

Image: Luis C. via Yelp