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Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign is promoting her as a “good prosecutor,” distinguishing her from former President Trump, whom she branded a bad criminal.
Harris served as San Francisco’s district attorney from 2004 to 2011 and as California’s attorney general from 2011 to 2017, and has been actively, and indeed enthusiastically, involved in the destructive criminal justice policies that have devastated California.
If she continues to rely on her own abysmal law enforcement record, she will be giving a gift to the Trump campaign.
Vice President Kamala Harris attends an event at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building South Court Auditorium in the White House on June 3, 2021. (Reuters/Evelyn Hochstein)
In San Francisco, she was a rogue prosecutor long before George Soros started funding the soft-on-crime district attorney who wreaked havoc in our city. She made protecting sanctuary cities policies, which shield illegal immigrants, including those with criminal records, from deportation, prosecution and the death penalty, a centerpiece of her platform.
Kamala Harris’ California prosecutor background means ‘problems’ for presidential campaign: lawyer
For example, Harris put her policy preferences above the law, refusing to seek the death penalty for Edwin Ramos Umaña, an illegal immigrant and MS-13 gang member who had previously been convicted of robbery, assault and assaulting a pregnant woman but had not been deported.
On June 22, 2008, Ramos killed grocery store night manager Anthony Bologna and his two sons, Michael and Matthew, as they were driving home after a family barbecue. Harris’ office balked at the case, and Ramos was not even convicted until Harris left office three years after the murders. Bologna’s widow and surviving children were forced into the witness protection program.
Harris refused to seek the death penalty for the killer of a police officer, once again putting his beliefs above the law. On April 10, 2004, gang member David Lee Hill killed 29-year-old San Francisco Police Officer Isaac Espinoza and severely wounded his partner, Officer Barry Parker.
Harris publicly stated that she would not seek the death penalty shortly after Hill’s arrest, angering professional prosecutors, police officers, and Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. Given Harris’ opposition to the death penalty, the jury found Hill guilty of second-degree murder, which typically carries a sentence of 15 years to life in prison. Hill received a life sentence because California law requires that the killing of an on-duty police officer be accompanied by a higher sentence.
Harris’ shift from tough-on-crime prosecutor to social justice advocate has faced scrutiny from conservative groups
Worse yet, Harris has shown that her personal views on crime are giving way to political ambition.
Ms. Harris did an about-face in 2014 when a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled California’s death penalty unconstitutional. As California’s attorney general, she appealed the ruling, making a bizarre case in part that it undermined important protections that courts have afforded defendants.
She also reversed her stance on “Jessica’s Law,” a bill that would have imposed tougher penalties on child sexual abusers. As San Francisco’s district attorney, Harris publicly supported Jessica’s Law in 2006, but later ordered parole officers to ignore the law’s restrictions on where sex offenders could reside when the law became politically expedient.
Not only has Harris put her personal views above the law, she has also delighted in abusing prosecutorial power. For example, as a district attorney and attorney general, she bragged about punishing parents with fines or truancy charges when their children skipped school, and about imposing collateral charges such as contributing to the delinquency of a minor or domestic violence.
Of course, the most vulnerable parents are the low-income, minority, and disabled parents whose children attend public schools. Harris has intimidated these families by bragging that “as a law enforcement prosecutor, I have a big stick to wield,” and deploying homicide and gang prosecutors to schools to intimidate administrators and parents alike.
Kamala Harris supported “defunding the police” in a 2020 radio interview, but the Biden campaign expressed opposition.
But it didn’t work, and overall school absenteeism continued to rise, according to the state Department of Education.
But perhaps Harris’ worst actions as a prosecutor were her efforts to keep innocent people in prison for wrongful convictions and overturned convictions secured through unconstitutional official misconduct, including perjury, evidence tampering and the suppression of exculpatory evidence..
For example, as District Attorney, Harris violated the Constitution by withholding important information from the defense about a police lab employee who had stolen drugs from the lab, intentionally interfered with the lab’s operations, been in an alcohol rehabilitation facility, and had been convicted of assault and domestic violence.
Harris’ unconstitutional and unethical conduct was so severe that over 600 lawsuits were dismissed and thousands more were put on hold for trial. Courts have accused her and her office of systematically violating the constitutional rights of defendants. Harris has blamed police and judges for her choices.
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As Attorney General, Harris continued to violate the Constitution and the civil rights of defendants. For example, she Daniel Larsen, an innocent man After a federal court overturned Larsen’s conviction and found him “factually innocent,” he spent an additional two years in prison. After Larsen was finally released, Harris continued to appeal and fight his release.
To make matters worse, Harris did everything in his power to keep Efrain Velasco-Palacios in custody, even though the court found that local prosecutors had inserted falsified confessions into the defendants’ depositions. Because the prosecutors’ evidence tampering did not involve “severe physical violence,” Harris argued, the court was wrong to describe the government’s “egregious misconduct” as “conscience-shattering.”
In a similar case, Baca v. Adams, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rebuked Harris at oral argument for defending a wrongful conviction that was unconstitutionally obtained by prosecutors through the perjured testimony of a jailhouse informant and a prosecutor. Both men lied under oath. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals severely rebuked Harris and her office, forcing her to dismiss the lawsuit.
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These are just a few of Harris’ failures as San Francisco’s and California’s top prosecutor: She also arbitrarily investigated and prosecuted organizations for her own political gain, failed to protect female staffers from sexual harassment by top male aides, and oversaw thousands of marijuana-related convictions that disproportionately affected Black and Latino communities, all while bragging about her own marijuana use in high school and college.
The more Harris brings up her background as a prosecutor, the more questions will be raised about her suitability as a presidential candidate.
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John Shue is a legal scholar and commentator who served in the administrations of Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush.
