Kamala Harris
Updated 103 Days AgoPublic
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Her history as a prosecutor and eventually legislator

The Pro-Kamala Case

Elected San Francisco DA in 2004 while promising to never impose capital punishment, and held to this even when 6 months later every cop and 'cops' like Feinstein were calling for the death penalty for a 21-year old who killed an undercover cop.
In 2004 instituted a program "which put first-time offenders between ages eighteen and twenty-four into eighteen-month-long city college apprentice programs, which contributed to the city’s recidivism rates dropping from 54 percent to 10 percent in six years".
Supported reforming California’s three-strikes law and refrained from seeking life sentences for people charged with non-violent violations of their third-strike.
Talks a good talk about the need for criminal justice reform.

But sadly,

She was a huge step back for San Francisco!
- Her initial election as San Francisco DA had her unseating arguably the most progressive DA in the country, and she did so while expressly pledging to play nice with the cops and to stop prosecuting them for their misconduct. Apparently Harris' criminal justice reform is big on leniency for police officers.
- "Under District Attorney Kamala Harris, the overall felony-conviction rate in San Francisco rose from 52 percent in 2003 to 67 percent in 2006, the highest seen in a decade. Many of the convictions accounting for that increase stemmed from drug-related prosecutions, which also soared, from 56 percent in 2003 to 74 percent in 2006." In contrast, while convictions had gone down under the prior DA, "violent crime had gone down close to 60 percent in San Francisco."
- "The prosecutor who handled the domestic violence unit at the time said that she never saw a crucial police report filed by the victim because police had incorrectly labeled it as a drunk-in-public offense, rather than an incident of domestic violence." But of course Harris's campaign glossed over law enforcement failings and blamed the progressive DA.
- "Early in the campaign, the San Francisco Ethics Commission, a city body that oversees local elections, handed Harris the largest fine in its history for breaking fundraising limits. She apologized for the error, but little could stop her fundraising machine."
- "In her seven years as district attorney, Harris’s office did not proactively assist in civil cases against clergy sex abuse and ignored requests by activists and survivors to access the cache of investigative files that could have helped them secure justice".
Championed the law making it a crime for elementary kids in California to be late to school, potentially jailing parents and hugely disproportionately affecting low-income households and not actually solving truancy rates anyways
Her office covered up a lab tech's malfeasance, and rather than admitting any problems she fought this in court, ultimately losing (and accusing the judge of a conflict of interest for having a husband who was a defense attorney, which she also lost on)
Fought to keep a Californian inmate from gender reassignment therapy
Attempted to block the release of non-violent offenders during prison overcrowding, saying that it would deprive the State of needed prison labor
Defended state prosecutor Robert Murray after he added false entries to a confession transcript to threaten a defendent with greater charges
Repeatedly brought charges against Backpage.com, and later co-authored bills resulting in its closure, which sex workers have said literally threatens their lives
Remember that death penalty thing in 2004? Well in 2014, she in fact appealed a federal judge's ruling that the death penalty was unconstitutional, arguing perversely that the ruling "undermines important protections that our courts provide to defendants" .
As California Attorney General, and running for Senate, in 2015 she opposed the push for state-wide standards requiring police body cameras.
In December 2014 she stood against a bill that would have required her office to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate police shootings, instead of relying on local DAs (and of course we know how she felt about investigating the police when she was a DA). The bill was endorsed by the NAACP and the ACLU, and opposed by Californian police organizations.
"Harris tried to dismiss a suit brought by California inmates over the state’s use of solitary confinement, with her office insisting “there is no ‘solitary confinement’ in California prisons” (despite this, the case ultimately turned into a landmark settlement that struck a blow against the practice)."
"In 2011, she actively fought a California bill that would have curbed civil asset forfeiture. Four years later, she sponsored a bill to expand the abilities of prosecutors to seize assets of those charged with a crime prior to the commencement of criminal proceedings."
Negotiated a deeply flawed and lacklustre deal in litigating against banks after the mortgage crisis, and even that only under intense pressure. And yet she has cited this as a victory she deserves credit for.
Laughed when asked if she would support legal marijuana.

But she's changed!

Has she?

As recently as 2017 her website apparently stated

Kamala believes that we must maintain a relentless focus on reducing violence and aggressively prosecuting violent criminals.

This sort of rhetoric always presages and underlies her claims of believing in reforms. While the entire /issues section on her website has since been removed, as is not surprising for the sort of centrist candidate running for the presidency that she is, it of course remains available via the Wayback Machine. As her "Criminal Justice System" section there went on, it states:

Kamala supports recent efforts in the Senate to pass the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, which provides a common sense approach to reform that will keep our communities safe and help millions of Americans rebuild their lives.

As always, the only victims are ones that are victims of crimes, never victims of our criminal justice system. And as usual with her citation of "reform", the reforms in question are minimal at best, and outright regressive at worst. Writing in Mother Jones in 2015, Shane Bauer had the following to say:

In a press conference to announce the bill, Sen. Dick Durban (D-Ill.) pointed out that the “United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country on earth.” Yet the 141-page Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act is remarkably unambitious in addressing that particular problem.
...
These sentencing reductions come with a trade-off. The bill would create new mandatory minimums for some crimes . . .
...
The bill proposes reforms to the federal prison system, such as recidivism reduction programs, in which some prisoners convicted of nonviolent crimes can get out early if they go to a reentry center or enter home confinement “subject to 24-hour electronic monitoring.” Interestingly, a section calling for more recidivism reduction calls for “a survey to identify products…that are currently manufactured overseas and could be manufactured by prisoners.”

Overall, the bill focuses on politically safe issues—long sentences for nonviolent drug offenses are now widely unpopular. But it doesn’t address the main driver of mass incarceration: sentencing for violent crimes. It’s a common myth that the war on drugs drove the fivefold increase in America’s total prison population since 1980. Nonviolent drug offenses do account for a full half of federal inmates, but in state prisons the story is much different. There, drug offenders account for just 16 percent of the prison population.

Ultimately, the only way to bring our prison population anywhere near pre-Reagan-era levels—when we had about 300,000 people behind bars—would be to make major changes in sentencing for more serious crimes. Nationally, 47 percent of prisoners are incarcerated for violent crimes and 18 percent for property offenses. If we let out everyone incarcerated for a drug offense, our total prison population would drop from 1.6 million to 1.2 million. The statistic that Durbin cited about the United States locking up more people than any other country would still be true.

This is the sort of criminal justice reform that Harris believes in: reform that still leaves the U.S. the biggest incarcerator in the world of its own population, and, of course, uses prison labor.

She's a decent enough politician to know to say the right things in this day and age, and change her rhetoric to fit the times. But that she's never renounced her long track record (barring misleading statements claiming she didn't take positions she had in fact publically taken), and her legislative record still betrays her sympathies. Not to mention that her reign as California's AG wasn't even a full Senate term ago, and she was consistent to the bitter end in protecting the injustices of our justice system.

And worth special mention since it's near to @keithzg's heart and voting jurisdiction,

In a case in Orange County, a public defender had discovered that the district attorney’s office was strategically placing jailhouse informants, offering them leniency if they could coax confessions from fellow inmates. A judge found that the district attorney’s office had lied to him about the use of informants and withheld potentially favorable evidence from defense lawyers.

When the judge disqualified the entire office from a death penalty case, Ms. Harris appealed, accusing the judge of abusing his discretion. While she opened an inquiry into the case at hand, she rejected repeated calls for a broad investigation of the prosecutor’s office.

In the recent interview, Ms. Harris said her decision reflected her experience when others had tried to disqualify her from the San Francisco death penalty case. It was up to voters, not the attorney general, she said, to remove elected prosecutors. “I knew misconduct had occurred, clearly it had,” she said. “And it was being handled at the local level.”

Unfortunately, the New York Times article that is from does not expressly cite what interview that is from, so it's unclear if she's just impossibly naive or outright knows that, in the time since, the people in charge of that egregious and systematic betrayal of the justice system have been replaced . . . by people with incredibly similar views of how to run things, including the police chief being replaced by his direct and loyal second-in-command (in fact both the Chief and DA were replaced by former protégés, although in the latter case there was at least personal animosity now).

Compare . . . Harris’s reply when asked about her decision to become a prosecutor: “There is a duty and responsibility to be a voice for the most voiceless and vulnerable and to do the work of justice. And that’s the work I wanted to do.”

Harris’s response might be understandable coming from someone with less experience — a lay person, a law student, or even a junior DA. But who, especially in the era of Black Lives Matter, would flatly describe the enforcement arm of the criminal enforcement as doing “the work of justice?” What person with any experience in criminal court can claim to be an advocate for the “most vulnerable,” without recognizing that the victim in one case is often the defendant in the next — that the issues at play are systemic, and that the justice meted out by the court system is a rough one at best? Harris has stayed away from engaging with these deeper questions in interviews. Perhaps because, as a prosecutor, she understands that there are no good answers.

. . .

Reid was, of course, right to observe that Democrats have run as “tough on crime” for the very same reasons Filipovic offered as a justification of Harris’s record: they were practically required to do so to get ahead. But I would suggest this: None of them were so obligated.

-Briahna Gray, "A Problem for Kamala Harris: Can a Prosecutor Become President in the Age of Black Lives Matter?"