How did San Francisco’s most notorious serial harasser, Bill Gene Hobbs, wind up back on city streets, free to slide — seemingly unsupervised — into his old ways after brief stints in jail, prison and a state mental hospital?

The answer starts with 13 words:

“Hopefully, he is telling us the truth, and he will take his medication.” 

San Luis Obispo County Superior Court Judge Barry LaBarbera spoke those words in March when he ordered that Hobbs be released from Atascadero State Hospital, where Hobbs was serving parole after being sentenced to 5½ years in jail and prison for grabbing, groping, forcibly kissing and chasing more than a dozen known victims. 

Three psychologists testified about Hobbs’ condition. They all agreed that Hobbs had a serious mental health disorder that was not in remission. Two further testified that Hobbs represented “a substantial danger of physical harm to others.”

Yet despite noting that Hobbs showed “little insight” into his disorder and that there “is certainly an argument that he represents a substantial danger” to the public, LaBarbera was not convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that Hobbs met the criteria required by state law to remain in the state hospital, so he had to be released. 

Unsurprisingly, this didn’t end well.   

In late October, Chronicle reporters witnessed Hobbs, in an erratic and agitated state, harassing women in San Francisco’s Duboce Triangle neighborhood. He was arrested soon after for alleged parole violations.

City residents were left dumbstruck and frustrated. How was a known serial groper with “EVIL” tattooed across his fingers so quickly back on the streets, seemingly no better than when he left? 

Officials offered little explanation beyond stating that Hobbs had served his full prison sentence and had been paroled to the community after a brief stint in Atascadero.

To understand what went wrong, the editorial board obtained court documents, reported here for the first time, that not only reveal the nature of Hobbs’ condition, but also expose stunning gaps in state law that governs the treatment of violent offenders with severe mental illness.  

“Hopefully … he will take his medication” aren’t just the words of an overly credulous judge; they effectively represent state policy.

California law doesn’t just permit offenders with violent histories to be released from mental hospitals despite still being severely ill and potentially dangerous. In some cases, it requires this to happen. And the state has few protocols to ensure these individuals, once released, safely reenter society — leaving local communities to suffer the consequences. 

If this sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve been here before. In 2023, exactly one week after his release from Atascadero after a court found he was no longer eligible for involuntary confinement, a man named Fook Poy Lai was accused of stabbing a Chinatown worker in the neck. Lai is currently in a state hospital after being found mentally incompetent to stand trial. 

Our coverage of Lai’s case prompted a change to California law that gave the state and counties more time to coordinate comprehensive plans for individuals released from state mental hospitals.

But Hobbs’ case shows that more robust changes are needed to the legal framework that governs violent offenders with serious mental illness. And it suggests that the state needs to take a more central role in caring for the hardest-to-treat and most dangerous individuals. 

*** 

As the end of Hobbs’ prison sentence neared, state doctors determined that he met the criteria required by state law to be considered an “Offender with a Mental Health Disorder” and could be forced to serve his parole in a state hospital instead of being released to the community. He was sent to Atascadero on Nov. 3, 2024.

Although California lawmakers disincentivized indefinite involuntary confinement and created stronger protections for civil liberties after the cruel warehousing of mentally ill people during the era of mass institutionalization, there are still multiple ways a person can wind up being involuntarily treated by the state.

Many offenders enter a state hospital from the criminal justice system after being found mentally incompetent to stand trial or not guilty by reason of insanity. But in this editorial, we’ll exclusively focus on the statutes and practices that govern Offenders with a Mental Health Disorder who are paroled to a state hospital from prison.

There are six criteria to be considered an Offender with a Mental Health Disorder, and they manage to be dense and vague at the same time:

1) The prisoner has a severe mental health disorder that, among other things, “substantially impairs” their thoughts, perception of reality or judgment, 2) has been sentenced to a potentially qualifying crime, 3) their mental illness was a cause of or aggravating factor in that crime, 4) their disorder is not in remission or can’t be kept in remission without treatment, 5) the prisoner has been treated for that disorder for at least 90 days within the year before parole, and 6) because of the disorder, the prisoner represents a substantial danger of physical harm to others.

In its most recent budget projections, the California Department of State Hospitals estimates that 1,033 people who meet these criteria will be in its hospitals by June 30, 2026 — out of a total state hospital population of 5,772. 

Offenders have the right to appeal this classification, and if the state prison department’s Board of Parole Hearings upholds it, they can take their appeal to a court. 

If the court finds someone doesn’t meet even one of the six criteria, the law says they must be released within 30 days.  

On Feb. 6, Hobbs filed an appeal in San Luis Obispo County Superior Court. He also waived his right to a jury trial — meaning that a judge would decide whether he needed to stay in the state hospital or could be released. 

The 67-page transcript of Hobbs’ March 18 trial features testimony from three psychologists — including two who initially evaluated Hobbs for his state hospital placement.

The psychologists and Hobbs himself testified that he suffers from bipolar 1 disorder with “psychotic features,” which the doctors said can manifest in episodes of high energy and mania, poor judgment, poor impulse control, grandiose illusions and hypersexuality. 

When Hobbs entered the state hospital, he “presented as manic, as evidenced by his racing thoughts, thought disorganization, and speaking about grandiose and hyper-religious topics,” psychologist Roxanne Rassti testified.

During Hobbs’ first few months in the hospital, the psychologists testified, he refused to take his prescribed medications — Zyprexa, an antipsychotic drug, and lithium, a mood stabilizer that helps treat manic episodes — because he didn’t yet believe he had a mental illness. 

Hobbs was ultimately placed on an involuntary medication order. Forced to take his meds, his symptoms began to improve by early December 2024, Rassti said, but were persistent enough that his dosage was upped on Jan. 28. 

Nevertheless, when Rassti interviewed Hobbs in February, she found he still “presented as hypomanic.” Rastti recounted to the court that Hobbs “went to his room three times during the course of our interview to grab materials, one of which was a large bag full of at least 10 notebooks” with “disorganized writings and concepts of a grandiose nature,” such as “his own idea for a neighborhood watch.” 

Rassti and the other psychologists, Charles Silverstein and Alexis Vosburg, agreed that Hobbs still met five of the six criteria to be considered an Offender with a Mental Health Disorder, including that his symptoms were not in remission.

But they disagreed on the sixth: whether Hobbs represented “a substantial danger of physical harm to others.”

The sticking point: the meaning of “physical harm.”

Silverstein, who interviewed Hobbs on Sept. 24, 2024, testified that Hobbs did present a danger of physical harm because “he put hands on (his victims) and restrained them.”

Hobbs, Silverstein added, was “at much higher risk of engaging in violent behavior in the future” because he refused to take his medications, had a “poor history of complying with conditions of supervised release” and had a history of illicit substance use.  

Vosburg, who interviewed Hobbs on Aug. 28, 2024, also testified that “restraining somebody,” the crime that sent Hobbs to prison, “would be considered some type of a physical injury.” She added that she believed Hobbs met the sixth criterion because he showed “no insight into his mental illness” and told her he didn’t plan to continue mental health treatment once released.

“I believe that his poor judgment and his hypersexuality places him at risk (of reoffending) if he is not taking his psychotropic medication and in treatment,” Vosburg said.

Rassti, however, disagreed. 

Hobbs, she argued, did not display the three main characteristics that she said research shows are associated with violent sexual offenders: a “pattern of escalating physical violence or predatory intent,” “fixating on victims” and engaging in “prolonged stalking behavior.”

Rassti acknowledged that “he caused great psychological and emotional harm to the victims.” But, she said, the law specifies “physical harm,” and despite his convictions for battery, sexual battery and assault and felony false imprisonment, “there is no evidence Mr. Hobbs has ever physically harmed another person.” 

This flies in the face of how many people think about sexual assault. But the law is vague enough about the meaning of “physical harm” to allow for such analysis.

In his testimony, Hobbs admitted that he had done some “inappropriate” things: “I grabbed those two girls’ butts,” he said.

But he seemed to see nothing wrong with the rest of his behavior: “Everything else was normal social interactions.” He also repeatedly denied picking up the woman and carrying her for a block — the crime that sent him to prison. “I did not pick that girl up and move her. I never did that,” Hobbs said. “I was never even there. I never met that lady.”  

This failure to acknowledge his crimes should have raised red flags for the court. Equally concerning, given the severity of Hobbs’ condition, was his game plan for what he would do if released: He said he planned to find a part-time job and earn an associate’s degree at City College of San Francisco while living in parole housing and going to Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings to “continue a life of sobriety.”

While these are fine long-term goals, Dr. Robert Okin, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at UCSF School of Medicine and the former chief of psychiatry at San Francisco General Hospital, told us someone with Hobbs’ condition almost certainly wouldn’t be ready for such challenges and would need “to be monitored daily, including his medication compliance … until he had demonstrated that he intended to follow these plans. Otherwise, the consequences could only be disastrous, as they proved to be.”

Hobbs did pledge “to continue taking my medication for the rest of my life,” even though he’d repeatedly failed to do so in the past — which, he admitted, had caused a “return of the mania.”

Sean Baird, a San Luis Obispo County deputy district attorney, conceded that “it seems Mr. Hobbs has made some significant improvement.” However, he said, much of this improvement seemed to come after the Jan. 16 Board of Parole Hearings date — and state law prohibits consideration of evidence past this date. 

Ultimately, though, the crux of Hobbs’ case “comes down to physical harm,” Baird said. “Dr. Rassti’s interpreting it to mean injury. That is not what the statute says.”

Hobbs’ defense lawyer, James Royer, argued that Rassti was “the most credible” because she’d spoken to Hobbs most recently and appeared to be the only one who’d spoken with his treatment team and reviewed his state hospital records. He added that the other psychologists “equated physical harm with psychological harm.”

This clearly resonated with Judge LaBarbera, who said that he found Rassti’s opinion “the most persuasive.” He added, “I respect her opinion because I’ve heard her opinions many, many times.”

Hobbs’ testimony was “persuasive,” the judge said, because he recognized his mental health disorder and “started to realize what the medications do for him.”

LaBarbera acknowledged that at the time of the Board of Parole Hearings decision, Hobbs’ mental disorder was not in remission, he had “little insight” into his condition, and that he could pose a “substantial danger.” But the judge voiced doubt as to whether Hobbs met all six criteria beyond a reasonable doubt — and granted Hobbs’ release.

“Hopefully … he’ll engage in services, he’ll be taking classes, substance abuse treatment, et cetera,” LaBarbera concluded. “Hopefully, he is to be trusted to do that.”

*** 

We still don’t know where exactly Hobbs went after his release from Atascadero — or the terms and conditions of his parole — when he returned to San Francisco on April 7. Officials from the district attorney’s office, public defender’s office, parole office, state prison department and state hospital department declined to provide details, citing privacy laws. 

Upon Hobbs’ release from Atascadero, “there was a comprehensive parole plan to address his reentry needs, including housing,” the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in an unsigned Oct. 30 statement.

But releasing an individual who still had severe mental health needs by invoking thoughts and prayers wasn’t an auspicious start. 

“You can’t make a decision on whether to discharge a patient based on hope,” Dr. Okin told the editorial board. “That would be like if you have cancer, and you say, ‘Well, I hope it goes away.’”  

Okin, who reviewed the transcripts at the editorial board’s request, found it disconcerting that LaBarbera was swayed by Rassti’s opinion. He argued Rassti — who declined to comment for this editorial — came up “with her own criterion” as to whether Hobbs posed a substantial risk of physical harm to others.

“She came up with this theory that the thing that required him to stay in the hospital would have been whether he showed predatory sexual behavior, i.e. an obsessive focus on and tracking of the women that he harassed,” Okin said. But those factors are “nowhere in the statute.”

Rassti may not have been aware of these incidents, given that many were wiped from Hobbs’ record due to judges dismissing multiple cases.

Nevertheless, it’s problematic that the vagueness of the criteria in California’s Offender with a Mental Health Disorder statute allows such subjective analysis to govern the release of dangerous individuals.

The phrase “substantial risk of physical harm,” for example, is not clearly defined — although the statute notes it “does not require proof of a recent overt act.” This suggests that an offender doesn’t need to have, say, bludgeoned someone over the head to pose a substantial risk to public safety — which weakens Rassti’s contention that Hobbs wasn’t a public safety threat. 

Still, the lack of clearer guidelines means 10 different psychologists could interpret that phrase in 10 different ways — leaving judges, who are not medical professionals, to make decisions based on rhetoric and gut feelings.

It doesn’t have to be this way. 

Research shows that evidence-based, standardized tools can more accurately gauge a person’s risk of committing violent or sexual offenses than a clinician’s unstructured judgment — their overall impression of a patient — Alex Yufik, a California-based board-certified forensic psychologist, told the editorial board.

Yufik, who also reviewed the transcripts at our request, noted that Silverstein and Vosburg appeared to be using unstructured judgment to appraise Hobbs’ risk. Rassti did identify specific risk factors, but it’s not clear how she chose them. Yufik said they aren’t included in the manual that forensic psychologists typically use to assess a patient’s sexual violence risk.  

“You really should use an evidence-based practice,” Yufik said. “I didn’t see that, from my perspective, in the transcript.”

Mandating that psychologists use a standardized tool to assess risk in cases like Hobbs’ would likely be highly controversial. The state Legislature historically has been reluctant to dictate how medical professionals should do their jobs, and these tools can have their own biases and blind spots.

In an unsigned statement, the California Department of State Hospitals confirmed “there is no standardized tool” to determine whether prisoners pose a substantial risk of physical harm to others. However, the department said, “evaluators do use and consider relevant research-established violence risk factors in their assessment,” such as episodes of mental-illness-related violence, mental-illness symptoms known to be linked to violence and a history of treatment noncompliance. 

Yet California legislators can’t continue to leave evidence-based analyses to chance involving decisions over releasing potentially dangerous individuals. They should specify standardized risk factors that psychologists and judges must consider when evaluating cases like Hobbs’. 

It’s also incumbent on the state to devise more reasonable and holistic release protocols. 

Many Californians might assume that state hospitals are required to at least outwardly stabilize patients with severe mental illness and histories of violence before releasing them. But this isn’t always true.

At the time of his release, Hobbs met five of the six criteria required to serve his parole in a state hospital, while experts argued over the sixth. This indicated he still had severe mental health needs that demanded a rigorous step-down plan.

The Department of State Hospitals told us that when patients are decertified as Offenders with a Mental Health Disorder, their treatment unit meets weekly with parole officials to share advice about patients’ clinical needs and recommended support. Thanks to changes in state law sparked by our reporting on the Lai case, courts can require these agencies to return to court to ensure they’ve coordinated a comprehensive release plan. 

That’s better than nothing. But in the eyes of the state, you’re either an Offender with a Mental Health Disorder or you aren’t. And if you aren’t, you are largely treated like any other parolee.

An individual’s parole terms — which are set by the state prison department’s Board of Parole Hearings — can include requirements such as mental-health treatment and medication. And a behavioral health reintegration unit is embedded in each parole office, ensuring parolees have access to licensed social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists. But parole officers are legally prohibited from forcibly administering medication or requiring someone to take prescribed medication — meaning there is very little recourse if a parolee with a history of severe mental illness and violence stops taking their medication against a doctor’s orders.  

This is especially concerning because, as experts told us, patients with these conditions likely need medication for life. And while maintaining a consistent regimen could allow many of these individuals to live normal lives — even those with violent pasts — falling off medication almost certainly leads to relapsing.

Medication alone isn’t enough. A patient like Hobbs would be best served by entering a facility less restrictive than a state hospital but far more structured than, say, a halfway house, Dr. Okin told us. 

“That converts the decision to discharge him from hope to evidence,” Okin said. 

Yet judges lack the ability to compel patients to be released to an appropriate environment. Nor does the state have any formal step-down requirements for patients who have successfully appealed their classification as an Offender with a Mental Health Disorder — short of recommending that the patient be placed under a conservatorship or referred to CARE Court. 

As a result, offenders like Hobbs are often released to locations unprepared to handle them. 

In San Francisco, many parolees wind up in facilities that aren’t “particularly equipped to serve people with severe mental illness and limited insight into their health conditions,” Charlie Berman, a San Francisco social worker serving clients with severe mental illness, told the editorial board. 

California broadly lacks enough beds to effectively and humanely treat individuals like Lai and Hobbs. 

Studies from the nonpartisan Rand Corp., the state auditor and the California Department of Health Care Services have found that a specific subset of severely mentally ill people — those with criminal records and complex co-occurring conditions — is creating disproportionate bottlenecks in California’s behavioral health system. In a 2022 state assessment, 58% of California’s counties said mental health providers were unwilling to accept people with felony convictions. 

Even the $6.4 billion investment from Proposition 1, which voters approved in 2024 to build behavioral health facilities at all levels of care, is unlikely to meet the demand.

This means that many individuals like Hobbs are all but certain to deteriorate quickly upon their release from a state hospital — effectively canceling out the resources and time spent stabilizing them.  

“There has to be a way where he can be discharged safely, so that he is safe as well as the community being safe,” Okin said. But the state’s current process “operates on the basis of trust and hope.”

***

California is fully aware that its current approach is failing — and that more effective alternatives exist. 

A July 2024 report by the Department of State Hospitals found that offenders who were released from state hospitals from 2012 through 2017 and entered a state-run conditional release program known as CONREP “consistently” and “significantly” demonstrated lower recidivism rates than those released directly into the community.

State hospital medical directors recommend Offenders with a Mental Health Disorder for CONREP if it’s determined they can be safely treated in the community. To participate, patients must agree to follow a court-approved treatment plan, which can include involuntary medication. Housing placement and intensity of services depend on the severity of needs. Failure to follow the plan can result in the patient being returned to the state hospital. 

The disparity in outcomes between this approach and direct release is shocking. 

Within one year of exiting the state hospital, those directly released into the community had a recidivism rate of more than 21%, compared to about 3% for those released under CONREP, the report shows. Within five years of exiting the state hospital, the recidivism rate for those released under CONREP was less than 10%, compared with nearly 50% for those directly released into the community.

CONREP is far from perfect. Civil libertarians have raised concerns that it can trap people in legal limbo for decades. And enhanced supervision can be moot if patients aren’t released to appropriate step-down facilities — as was the case last year in San Diego, where a man deemed to be a sexually violent predator was released as a transient under CONREP after officials struggled to find a suitable placement for him. 

Yet it’s hard to dispute that CONREP, while flawed, has far better outcomes than direct community release. The state itself appears to acknowledge this in the 2024 report, noting that “expanded access to CONREP programs would reduce recidivism for patients discharged from the state hospitals overall.” 

By “easing CONREP release criteria,” the report continued, the state hospital system could “place the patients most vulnerable to rearrest and most in need of services into CONREP, rather than directly into the community through courts or other means.”  

That’s encouraging. But, as Dr. Okin told us, expanding CONREP eligibility alone won’t solve the problem, absent a significant expansion in housing, community placements and treatment resources. 

“What is needed is a state-mandated or operated clinical step-down continuum — staffed, funded and empowered to treat the people who are too ill for simple release but do not meet the full statutory criteria for (Offender with a Mental Health Disorder) commitment,” Okin said. 

The Department of State Hospitals told us in a statement that while it does not comment on potential or pending legislation, that doesn’t mean it isn’t “participating in, or advocating for, further improvements in treatment models or systems of care.” The department noted that it received funding in the 2021 state budget to establish new settings for CONREP patients who are discharged from state hospitals but need higher levels of care than the program typically provides.  

But it still wouldn’t benefit someone like Hobbs. Once the court determined he wasn’t an Offender with a Mental Health Disorder, he would no longer be eligible for CONREP under current laws. 

***

For the moment, Hobbs is no longer in San Francisco. After being arrested on two alleged parole violations — for missing a mental-health treatment program meeting and failing to fully charge his GPS monitoring device — his parole was administratively revoked on Oct. 30, court records show. On Nov. 10, “parole arranged to have his supervision transferred out of San Francisco to another jurisdiction, where Mr. Hobbs could be closer to his support system,” the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office said in a statement. 

Hobbs is still under the supervision of parole agents in San Francisco, however, and will presumably have to return to the city regularly for court appearances.

Will he have better success in another jurisdiction? We certainly hope so. 

But hope is not a meaningful solution to cases like Hobbs’. Only painstaking, difficult policy changes from state leaders — with the infrastructure to support them — can do that.