“Women and women of color deserve to have a seat at the table where decisions are made.” ~ Kamala Harris, Twitter, July 10, 2019
Researching this article has changed me.
I’ve written a lot about Kamala Harris. I’m not committed to her candidacy, but I do identify with the misrepresentation of her record and her strategies by people who are so brazenly, proudly ignorant of her logic and her process.
The impulse to write this piece appeared after the July 31st Democratic debate when Tulsi Gabbard lobbed a turd bomb of ill-informed, self-aggrandizing nuttiness at Kamala Harris. And much as I don’t care for Gabbard on so many levels, I was of the opinion that it was time for Harris to sit down with Rachel Maddow or Nicole Wallace in primetime and deconstruct her judicial record as first, San Francisco’s District Attorney (2004 to 2011), then as California’s Attorney General (2011 to 2016.) As so many leaning left — especially those identifying themselves as “leftists” — have, Gabbard cherry picked some of the most complicated aspects of Harris’s criminal justice resume, took the swallowist possible perspective then weaponized that into a sound bite that Harris could not conceivably respond to in sixty seconds.
But as I set out to do the real work, I quickly found myself researching Tulsi Gabbard: that culminated in my last piece, “Tulsi Gabbard Looks More and More Like a Troll With a Glass Jaw.” And dear god, was that a whacky ride down the rabbit hole. She is not a very interesting person, but she certainly does what she can to attract attention where there is not much substance. Gabbard somehow manages to be utterly transparent and dissembling at the same time, making her appear to me, at least, to be a hot disingenuous mess.
“In her career, Ms. Harris did not barter or trade to get the support of more conservative law-and-order types; she gave it all away.” ~ Lara Bazelon, The New York Times
So recently, as I hear all the truncated criticism of Harris piled on and conflated by opponents, I have been driven to look closer, and oh, what I’ve found. I want to start with one person in particular: Lara Bazelon of The New York Times. Her bio says she is a law professor and the former director of the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent in Los Angeles and she authored the January 17, 2019 article, “Kamala Harris Was Not a ‘Progressive Prosecutor’” for the NYT. I pulled up so many pieces on various aspects of the candidate’s record in California; time and time again, Lara Bazelon is the first reference, the place from which every other liberal “journalist” described as their baseline line for information. Obviously, I had to check out that article.
To say that I was dumbfounded is putting it politely: Bazelon’s article is so critically lacking in anything more than cursory research, so lacking in any nuanced, fact based analysis or even necessarily complex narratives, that I could have written this superficial hit piece in the seventh grade. A whole litany of California papers — The Los Angeles Times, The Sacramento Bee, SFGate, even Vox, Politico and fucking Wikipedia — provided a more thorough, circumspect view of Kamala Harris’s prosecutorial past. So while Bazelon was writing to a base already sharing her own narrow liberal lens on criminal justice, it is incomprehensible to me that she is any excuse for an arbiter of candidate Harris’s political character. So, Ms. Bazelon, let’s try this again.
Context
Kamala Harris’s record on criminal justice in California is complicated. Bits are tossed out into the ether like chum to sharks by lazy minds, because they fear Kamala Harris. They fear her unequivocal nature. They fear the precision of her mind. And they fear her unapologetic bullshit detector as the totality of their presence in the world is the sum of their bullshit. To be fair, I would say that about Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand and Amy Klobuchar as well. But Harris is a particular case because confrontation and precision of mind and speech is what she does best.
From 1990 to 1998 young Kamala Harris was a deputy district attorney in Alameda County, California. We came of age watching the same world unfold, so I have a clue what was informing her at the time. When Bill Clinton signed the 1994 Crime Bill it was perceived as “getting tough on crime” by instituting some very bad ideas — including the “three strikes” provision allowing even non-violent and petty offenders to be locked up for life after a third arrest, as well as the expansion of charges that could justify “capital punishment.” While only 10% of those incarcerated were in federal facilities, the Clinton administration gave license to state’s to move on draconian legislation they’d been aching to pass, much of that race based. Washington provided the states more money to build prisons, hire law enforcement and basically run roughshod over civil rights. Obviously that was not this intended effect, but that legislation was a study in unintended consequences.
Since The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 the disparity in sentencing between the white folks using powder cocaine — and there as many or more of those — and the black folks using crack cocaine basically guaranteed that African Americans, especially men, were exponentially more likely to spend long stretches behind bars and to do so more frequently. This destroyed families.
The fault lines all seem obvious now that it has all shaken out and prison reform is on a much more “enlightened” path. Keep in mind, the reality that the political pissing war between Republicans and Democrats to prove whose was bigger on fighting crime also drove the cost of mass incarceration into orbit. It finally occurred to some individual localities and creative minds that helping people stay out of the system might be more costs effective.
But at the time, everyone — even black community leaders who were at the end of their ropes trying to secure their communities — everyone thought this was a good idea. I did. I can’t speak for Senator Harris, but I proffer that that crime bill set the tone for criminal justice for the next twenty years. And if any of these candidates are to catch hell for it, Joe Biden was all up in it at the time and prepared to say so to any crowd or any camera. Harris was a young deputy district attorney taking it all in and trying to figure out how to navigate the water she was swimming in.
Now, I don’t need to see anyone crucified over that tragic debacle cause it was our collective original sin: we were all wrong, now all there is to do is own it and fall on the proverbial sword. My point is that that is where Kamala Harris cut her professional teeth. She was a black woman with progressive instincts and a driving ambition coming of age in a white man’s panacea of sorry ideas.
San Francisco Crime Lab Scandal
“Ms. Harris contested the ruling by arguing that the judge, whose husband was a defense attorney and had spoken publicly about the importance of disclosing evidence, had a conflict of interest. Ms. Harris lost.” ~ Lara Bazelon
First, let me say, I don’t even know what the fuck that means: look again at the 2010 San Francisco crime lab scandal when Harris was the district attorney in San Francisco. According to reporting by the local NBC affiliate, in 2009 lab technician Debbie Madden, a 29 year employee of the lab, was accused of skimming cocaine evidence for personal use. Her attorney claimed she’d only ingested trace amounts of cocaine residue, but an internal review found significant amounts of drug evidence missing and co-workers reported that her behavior had become increasingly bizarre in the fall of ’09. Madden had been found guilty of domestic violence and vandalism in San Mateo County for attacking her partner in a contentious break-up. The conviction was not reported up the command chain by officers and Madden was not even questioned by San Francisco police until February, 2010, after her sister notified her direct supervisor that she’d found a vial of cocaine on Madden’s dresser.
Assistant District Attorney Sharon Woo emailed her boss — the Chief Assistant DA — on November 19, 2009 that Madden appeared to be sabotaging cases by calling in sick on days she was scheduled to appear in court. This was apparently the extent of the knowledge of the District Attorney’s office until early 2010. The crime lab was shut down within days of police directly questioning Madden on February 26, 2010.
As the District Attorney at the top of the chain of command, it is hard to insist that Harris could have somehow intervened in a situation she didn’t know was in progress; everyone ultimately conceded that the tech’s misbehavior was well underway long before Harris took office and that she was the last to hear about it. Police admit fault for not reporting the lab tech’s assault conviction, admitting their error, and there was clearly an investigation in the making in November, ’09 when ADA Woo voiced her concerns. Depending on the source, it is reported that between 600 and 1000 drug cases were dropped over this matter and the ones that were not were still under investigation.
In 2012, forty of the defendants involved in that lab scandal filed a motion before Superior Court Judge Anne-Christine Massullo to have their cases dropped saying their rights had been violated by hiding damaging information about the lab technician. Massullo slammed Harris’ office saying the AG had the “duty to implement some type of procedure to secure and produce information relevant to Madden’s criminal history.” But she refused to dismiss a single case, so apparently even the judge concluded that DA Harris had done what was necessary under the circumstances to contain a mess that she did not make.
Measures have been taken since this incident to insure that police officers don’t just “keep it to themselves” until critical mass makes that impossible. I’m really not sure, short of being clairvoyant, what else Harris was expected to do about this.
Death Penalty
“When a federal judge in Orange County ruled that the death was unconstitutional in 2014, Ms. Harris appealed. In a public statement, she made the bizarre argument that the decision ‘undermines important protections that our courts provide defendants.’” ~ Lara Bazelon
Harris has always maintained that she, personally, opposes the death penalty. In April 2004, her first year as district attorney, a San Francisco police officer was shot. Harris angered the police union by refusing to seek the death penalty, and the cop killer was sentenced to life in prison for second degree murder. In 2009, she defied opposition again when she refused to seek the death penalty for Edwin Ramos, an illegal immigrant alleged to be a member of gang MS-13, for the murder of a man and his two sons.
Then in 2014, U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney, ruled that the decades long delays in actually executing prisoners violated the constitutional ban on “cruel and unusual punishment,” thereby making California’s capital punishment provision unconstitutional. Judge Cormac is right on the facts, of the 900 people sentenced to die in California since 1978, only 13 actually had been put to death. No one has been executed in the state since 2006 after a federal judge ruled that the three-drug cocktail procedure sometimes caused excruciating pain and had to be replaced. No single drug solution had been found and several manufacturers don’t want to be attached to executions.
AG Harris appealed the decision to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
“I am appealing the court’s decision because it is not supported by the law, and it undermines important protections that our courts provide to defendants. This flawed ruling requires appellate review.”
Harris’s explanation was to clarify that is was her job, and her client is the state of California.
“I have a client, and I don’t get to choose my client.”
It was easy enough to argue that she wasn’t doing her job when she would not defend the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, but now she insist on being California’s lawyer when it comes to defending the death penalty as long as it is legal in the state.
The devil is in the details: the judge ruled on the unconstitutionality of “cruel and unusual punishment,” not on points of law in any individual case. He argued that these defendants were just spending too long in prison in a state of suspended uncertainty, and that is cruel. For sure. It can be argued that choosing not to torture a prisoner to death with bad drugs is a show of humanity. I could also argue that if you are opposed to state sanctioned murder and your job is to advocate for the state, keeping people alive on death row is better than making them dead. And realistically, re-litigating 900 cases, knowing full well that the state was disinclined to kill anyone else anytime soon anyway, could be a much longer haul than simply waiting till the law was changed. And what was bound to happen to all 900 inmates, would they be returned to the general population? What does taking them all off death row mean? Where do they go? It’s not as if they were being released onto the streets or their cases were being re-litigated.
Furthermore, after trials, appeals and incarceration — never mind, the inordinate expense of actually putting someone to death — state sanctioned murder is exponentially more expensive than imprisoning a person for life, if that is what the crime warrants.
Finally, one in ten death row inmates is eventually cleared of the crime, if he lives long enough. Ode to technology.
As if to make my earlier point,
“Last week, my home state of California issued a moratorium on the death penalty — a system that has proven time and again to be an abject failure. It has wasted taxpayer money, has not kept our communities safe, and has discriminated against those with mental illness and people of color.” ~ Kamala Harris, March, 2019
So taking all things into account, perhaps AG Harris was simply playing a longer game than those coming for her political hide, she did her job and still didn’t end up killing anybody.
Truancy Measures
“Harris also championed state legislation under which parents whose children were found to be habitually truant in elementary school could be prosecuted, despite concerns that it would disproportionately affect low-income people of color.” ~ Lara Bazelon
In 2010, Harris introduced measures fining parents of truant elementary school aged children up to $2000 and potential jail time for failing to get their kids to class. Governor Schwarzenegger signed it in September. This set liberal hair on fire. In 2011, Harris addressed it directly in her inaugural:
“We know chronic truancy leads to dropping out, which dramatically increases the odds that a young person will become either a perpetrator or a victim of crime. Folks, it is time to get serious about the problem of chronic truancy in California. Last year we had 600,000 truant students in our elementary schools alone, which roughly matches the number of inmates in our state prisons. Is it a coincidence? Of course not.
And as unacceptable as this problem is — I know we can fix it. In San Francisco, we threatened the parents of truants with prosecution, and truancy dropped 32 percent. So, we are putting parents on notice. If you fail in your responsibility to your kids, we are going to work to make sure you face the full force and consequences of the law.”
This measure was supported by the California Federation of Teachers. Most parents, in all likelihood, took their child’s classroom attendance more seriously, and those subject to the most punitive aspects of this ordinance — most likely — had some deeper issues at home that were affecting their child’s education. It would obviously have to be measured case-by-case. But to simply react with scorn to an effort to do something about a problem that has such a profound effect of children’s futures — especially children of color — is just shortsighted and small-minded.
Proposition 47
“In 2014, she declined to take a position on Proposition 47, a ballot initiative approved by voters, that reduced certain low-level felonies to misdemeanors.” ~ Lara Bazelon
Ms. Bazelon is either sloppy or disingenuous when she tosses in a single reference to AG Harris’s lack of enthusiasm for the 2014 Proposition 47, “that reduced certain low-level felonies to misdemeanors,” and doesn’t go further. Harris didn’t take a position on the proposition, perhaps because she anticipated the potential problems it ultimately wrought. Mainly, that the police stopped collecting DNA samples from people arrested for what are now misdemeanors, reducing the sample pool from 15,000 to 5,000 over the three months after the proposition past; arrests for more serious crimes dropped substantially and cases became harder to make because the DNA evidence that might have identified suspects had not been procured when the perpetrators committed lesser crimes.
A spokesperson complicated the matter by explaining that it would have been improper for the office to take a position because it was responsible for preparing the ballot booklets. That is obviously ridiculous and that’s not the only time such a dumbass excuse came out of the DA’s office, but it ought to be a heads-up to any discerning adult that something more significant is going on.
I guarantee that the very same people slamming Kamala Harris for not speaking out about the problem she anticipated would have — if she had voiced her trepidations — been slamming her for trying to “harsh their mellow” over what they were sure was their big good deed. Now, I have no way of knowing for sure what her thinking was on that, but this sounds like a real possibility to me. Damned if she does. Damned if she don’t.
Legalization of Weed
“She laughed when a reporter asked if she would support the legalization of marijuana for recreational use.” ~ Lara Bazelon
In the world of priorities, I would imagine that the legalization of weed for stoners is not at the top. One has no idea what really pressing matters the head criminal justice official in the state might have been dealing with moments before a reporter confronted her with this banal question: she might have laughed reflexively at the juxtaposition of the moments. Yet, again and again someone has repeated this silly quote as if it means a goddamned thing. And this is what Lara Bazelon — and all her subscribers — points to as proof that Kamala Harris was dismissive on the subject of weed. Does the word “context” mean anything? That’s just bad reporting.
On the subject of cannabis, in 2010, DA Harris opposed the legalization of recreational weed, but she evolved. In 2015, she called for an end to the federal prohibition on medicinal marijuana. In 2018, she co-sponsored a bill with Senator Cory Booker to eliminate marijuana as a Status 1 controlled substance and to require federal courts to expunge earlier convictions for simple possession and use. That is all anyone really needs to say about Kamala Harris and weed.
Police Shootings
“In 2015, she opposed a bill requiring her office to investigate shootings involving officers. And she refused to support statewide standards regulating the use of body-worn cameras by police officers.” ~ Lara Bazelon
Another name to reliably look to for a rebuke in a sound bite is Phelicia Jones,
“How many people need to die before she steps in?”
To those already on the same page in their judgment of Harris that is apparently supposed to be “enough said,” except it’s not.
There is an inclination — especially in communities of color — to look at Kamala Harris as a woman of color and assume that she is, by definition, “on your side” in all matters involving police shootings. We’ve all seen enough of the hubris of cops shooting black men in the back, even when they know they may be carried live, streaming on a bystander’s iPhone. Yet some cops do it. So I think most us understand that assumption.
But the Attorney General is the top law enforcement officer for the whole state: that means cops too. And I am not sure how I feel about the way she’s handled specific officer involved shootings. Ezell Ford was unarmed and mentally ill when he was shot by a Los Angeles cop in 2014. Mario Woods was killed by a cop in 2015; still, referring to this as “police terrorism” didn’t do much to help sort it out. It’s hardly as if that shit only happens in California. I don’t know why no special prosecutor was appointed, as local cops should not be charged with investigating each other. I don’t know what can possibly be the efficacy in not putting body cameras on officers. I don’t get it, but I can’t understand how another cop, let alone a jury, looks at some of the videos — that we’ve all seen — of cops killing black men — mostly — and give it a “no bill.”
What AG Harris did do was bring in the U.S. Department of Justice— this was back before the DOJ was run by a feckless solipsist — and assign the state’s civil rights division to monitor the case. The police unions can be tough customers; while this seemed weak to progressive activists, you can bet the cops didn’t like it much at all.
And it should not be forgotten that, when the cops wanted David Hall, Officer Espinoza’s killer executed, Harris said no. When everyone wanted alleged gang member Edwin Ramos to die for killing three men, she said no. Harris demonstrated that she will not be bullied into abandoning her principals. She bent but she didn’t break.
And the data in the aggregate demonstrates that, big picture, she’s implemented effective policies that at least attempted to distinguish between real criminals and most of the people arrested. People who need help solving a problem and don’t have any other ideas. Some of the individual situations require more complex considerations. I think Kamala Harris has earned the benefit of the doubt.
People who know Harris well disagree with Phelicia Jones. “…it’s important to remember that Harris come from a law enforcement background,” says Eric Rose, a public affairs expert in Los Angeles.
“Harris has been smart about using that cachet to address concerns about racial bias and police accountability without ‘turning into a lightening rod for either side.’ She hasn’t backtracked on her beliefs. She hasn’t switched positions. She’s a true liberal, but she’s been smart about finding the right issues to talk about that would not alienate the law enforcement community.”
I cannot conjecture on these points, but I do think that this is a subject on which candidate Harris needs to be given a platform to deconstruct, at length.
Criminal Justice
In 2004, as San Francisco’s DA, Harris initiated the “Back on Track Reentry Act,” allowing those arrested for nonviolent crimes and first time drug offenses to plead guilty for a deferral of sentencing and court supervision for a year. If they got a GED, held a job and took parenting classes their records would be expunged. The program had a very low recidivism rate. The first incarnation, however, included illegal immigrants, that met with resistance especially after one was arrested for assault; conceding the mistake, the program was limited to those who could legally work in the United States. In 2009, the initiative was signed into state law by Republican Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Harris made in clear early on, however, that she would show no tolerance for hardcore criminality. In 2004, she pushed for higher bail for criminal defendants involved in gun-related crimes. She argued at the time that low bail encouraged outsiders to commit crimes in San Francisco. The crime rate dropped.
Over a decade later as a senator, after she’d had time to get a broader picture on the matter of “bail,” she co-sponsored a bill with, of all people, Rand Paul (R-KY), to encourage states to reform bail systems that detain hundreds of thousands of people for low level infractions — that they have not yet been convicted of — simply because they can’t make bail. Thus, keeping them from their families and their jobs. The ideal is to eliminate “money” bail.
The San Francisco Police Department credited Harris with tightening loopholes in bail and drug programs that defendants had used in the past; in the next breath, though, the police union called her too “deliberate” in her prosecution of murder suspects. If deliberate means “thoughtful” or “judicious,” it seems to me that when one is evaluating whether or not someone took a life, and if so, how to punish that act, a deliberate temperament would be a good thing, I would think. But I’m not a cop.
“When she became district attorney, no one was talking about progressive prosecutors, She was absolutely an outlier within the California District Attorneys Association, [and] got some pushback and criticism from there.” ~ Tim Silard, formerly of the San Francisco DA’s office
The ’94 crime bill had introduced the dreadful “Three Strikes” law that had resulted in thousands of arrest for non-violent drug crimes landing offenders in prison for life. Harris changed the requirement so that they were only charged for a third strike if the felony was a serious or violent crime. Opposition was strong and that change didn’t pass statewide until 2012. That should be a reminder to liberals that what seems obvious to you is not necessarily the way everyone sees it: and other people want their views represented too.
One story that kept turning up in my research — to what end I do not know — is that in 2013,
“…the San Francisco Weekly reported that the San Francisco Police Department and Harris’s office shielded Abraham H. Guerra Sr., a high-ranking member of the Norteños gang, from returning to prison due to parole violations because Guerra was an informant who provided authorities with information.”
I’m not sure what the objective here is: how do people think these things are done? I don’t know what anyone thinks this says about DA Harris, but it keeps getting reprinted. Then to no one’s shock or surprise, when Harris so effectively “interviewed” this administration’s cabinet members before the Senate, the president tweeted, calling her out for “supporting the animals of MS-13.” Appropo of absolutely nothing, but that he heard it somewhere.
So y’all, just keep saying whatever stupid shit comes into your heads cause the idiot-n-chief will eventually give you an audience.
“Cruel and Unusual Punishment”
In 2011 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that prison overcrowding in the state constituted “cruel and unusual punishment.” AG Harris fought the decision:
“I have a client, and I don’t get to choose my client.”
California failed to reduce crowding by the deadline and was ordered to get serious about parole. There were surely a lot of legitimate reasons for the delay, it was an epic undertaking, but the press release was so badly conceived: Harris’s office argued that prisons would lose an important source of labor if too many prisoners were released. Whoever crafted that press statement needed a time out.
Harris later told the website ThinkProgress:
“The way that argument played out in court does not reflect my priorities… The idea that we incarcerate people to have indentured servants is one of the worst possible perceptions. I feel very strongly about that. It evokes images of chain gangs.”
I don’t completely understand why the AG’s office would make such a tone deaf comment but that the job was overwhelming, making thousands of quick decisions about who should be summarily released and who shouldn’t. What could possibly go wrong? But I do think that anybody who’s aching to criticize better be sure they can do that shitty job better, choose your words carefully or just be quiet.
“The bottom line is the buck stops with me, and I take full responsibility for what my office did.” ~ Kamala Harris, when asked about criticisms of her professional choices
LGBTQ
“I was the attorney general of California for two terms and I had a host of clients that I was obligated to defend and represent. I couldn’t fire my clients, and there were unfortunately situations that occurred where my clients took positions that were contrary to my beliefs.” ~ Kamala Harris when asked why she sought to keep transgendered inmates from getting gender reassignment surgery as attorney general.
As DA in San Francisco, Harris created a special unit to investigate hate crimes against LGBT children, and she organized a conference to address the utterly absurd “gay-transgender panic defense.” As AG, she refused to enforce the state ban on gay marriage and performed the state’s first gay marriage. So activists were stunned, in 2015, when she argued against the rights of two transgendered inmates to have the “gender reassignment” procedure while in prison.
There’s no activist more “in your face” than a LGBTQ activist: that has to be respected because without that fierce commitment human beings would still be hiding in closets waiting to die of the “gay plague,” and that is just not right. And Harris basically said that, while she personally was inclined to provide this most extreme procedure, it was her job to draw some limits on what anyone under the tender care of the state could reasonably demand of the state.
Now I am going some things that are slightly to the right of comments by the candidate. Things that many of us who are not of the “activist” stripe agree on and don’t talk about cause we don’t want strangers shouting in our faces: I know the state has a responsibility to provide necessary and appropriate medical treatment to inmates, and I know that what is necessary varies case-to-case. I also believe that LGBTQ inmates should be given reasonable latitude for their particular issues: just like a menopausal woman should get hormones, so should a transgender person get what is required to ease that process. Within reason.
But you know what else is true of a transgender inmate? He or she is still a criminal. My uncle was a career criminal; there was a revolving door with his name on it down at the penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas where he spent a good deal of his adult life, after aging out of the juvenile system. And when he wasn’t locked up, that was only because he hadn’t been caught yet. The man only saw life as what — and who — he had to do to get over, to have his aberrant impulses satisfied. The world of the chronic criminal is simply that: how little do I have to do to get what I want? Who do I have to hurt? It is a culture of pathological criminals. My uncle was a bad guy, he knew bad people.
One of the things I learned from my uncle and his associates is that they generally saw it as a strategy to commit a crime — some very serious crimes — to get locked up again so the state would take care of their oral surgery, their eye surgery, their prostate cancer or their melanomas, because the care was better than most tax paying citizens received. And it was free. And they got to hang with their pals. So I am not really okay with the LGBTQ career criminal who gets locked up so the state will cover the insanely expensive and complex gender reassignment procedure, then be held to pay for the lifetime of follow-up that requires. One of the two inmates who wanted the surgery was paroled before the claim was settled, and I’m wagering he was pretty pissed that his master plan didn’t work out.
Kamala Harris can’t say that but I can.
Financial Crimes & Steve Mnuchin
“We went and we followed the facts and the evidence, and it’s a decision my office made. We pursued it just like any other case. We go and we take a case wherever the facts lead us.” ~Kamala Harris
As California AG in 2011, Harris prosecuted predatory lending cases, among other financial crimes, leading up to the creation of the Mortgage Fraud Strike Force. But in 2013 she did not prosecute OneWest, Steve Mnuchin’s bank. The DOJ suspected “widespread misconduct,” but that is wildly unspecific. Harris says only that she was “following the evidence,” and Mnuchin donated $2000 to her ’16 Senate campaign.
This is another of the matters that the left points to as a “gotcha” moment, but anyone who does is pretty pathetic. We can agree that Steve Mnuchin is a bottom-feeding slug, if only because he willingly defied the law in refusing to turn over Donald Trump’s tax returns, then suing to keep Congress from subpoenaing the returns from the IRS. But that happened this year.
The case in question was in 2013, back in the day when — though Mnuchin has certainly been a lifelong bottom-feeding slug — he was not Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary yet, so he had not gone public and global with his general creepiness. We don’t know the facts of the case and given that Kamala Harris filed criminal violations against a lot people, it might be advisable to take her at her word that there was not enough to make a case against Mnuchin. And like it or not, liberals, $2000 is little more than a “thank you” card in that world of excess. Not even remotely enough to suggest buying influence: she voted against the confirmation of Mnuchin as Secretary of the Treasury.
Harris has been unflagging in investigating financial and global corporations for criminal violations. After an oil spill from a pipeline damaged the California coastline resulting in dozens of indictments, she pursued Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, Phillips 66, Valero Energy, and Tesoro for price fixing.
Much as some want to make this evidence of some deeper conflict, it may it just be a thing that happened, and not much of a thing at that.
Corrupt Attorneys & Other Judicial Malfeasance
“Worst of all, though, is Ms. Harris’s record in wrongful conviction cases… In 2015, when the case reached the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, Ms. Harris’s prosecutors defended the conviction. They pointed out that Mr. Gage, while forced to act as his own lawyer, had not properly raised the legal issue in the lower court, as the law required.” ~ Lara Bazelon
Evidently, Bazelon thinks this is her “coup de gras”: the cherry on the argument that, in her mind, makes her case — whatever that is. I’m telling you, what I’ve offered here is apparently the sum of her argument. Literally, these quotes combined constitute almost the entirety of her NYT piece.
Starting with the obvious: in this country no one is “forced” to act as his own lawyer. George Gage’s public defender may have been incompetent — he may have been a fucking junkie for all I know — but no one goes to court in any state without an attorney unless he chooses to.
Gage has a challenging case and, as far as I can tell, he may still be in prison over a technicality. Appellate judges sent it to mediation so they clearly had misgivings, but Harris didn’t overturn his conviction. I don’t know why and neither do you. But if he’s an innocent man, make the case.
Daniel Larsen spent 15 years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. He was sentenced to 28 years to life for possession and carrying a concealed weapon.
“…his trial lawyer was incompetent and there was compelling evidence of his innocence…Ms. Harris argued that Mr. Larsen failed to raise his legal arguments in a timely fashion.” ~ Lara Bazelon
What does that mean? Bazelon references no actual points of law. If it’s so clear to Lara Bazelon that Daniel Larson is an innocent man, she can make that case. But he is a former neo-nazi, and I suspect a lot of people had a hard time caring. It’s always somebody else’s fault that the system failed this guy to hear Bazelon tell it. In this case, it’s Harris, but I get the impression that whoever advocated on points of law — once Bazelon and her devotees had decided to dig in on a position — would be the big meanie.
Harris changed her mind in the case of Johnny Baca who’d been convicted of murder, after a video of oral arguments showed — beyond doubt — that the prosecutor presented false testimony. Apparently Harris was not so dug in that she couldn’t see reason.
And Kevin Cooper: convicted of killing four people in 1983, including two children. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1985, so this case has been around for a while. For whatever reason, Harris refused to fully revisit Cooper’s case using new DNA technology. The current governor, Gavin Newsom, has ordered a full evaluation of the case using current science to decide whether Cooper stays on death row.
“My career as a prosecutor was marked by fierce opposition to the death penalty while still upholding the law and a commitment to fixing a broken criminal justice system. I’ve long been an advocate for measures to improve and make our system more fair and just.
As a firm believer in DNA testing, I hope the governor and the state will allow for such testing in the case of Kevin Cooper.” ~ Kamala Harris
But to be fair, not a single governor or attorney general — not Jerry Brown or Arnold Schwarzenegger or Gray Davis — has moved on this case since 1985. Perhaps AG Harris was not as proactive as Bazelon or Nick Kristoff would have liked, or that I would have liked if I felt that sure that Kevin Cooper was an innocent man, but it’s been over thirty years. Why is this possible epic miscarriage of justice suddenly all Kamala Harris’s bad?
If you want Kevin Cooper cleared, make the case. If Gavin Newsom does that, everyone will be happy.
After the way Hillary Clinton was treated by people who didn’t even attempt a thorough assessment of her character or the history that informed her, it appears to me that the left is just being sandbagged into dismissing a solid candidate because ideologues are so reactive and swallow that they seriously think that sharing re-tweets and sound bites constitute research. And I won’t get started on the breath and depth of the racism, sexism and misogyny I see in the way Kamala Harris is being treated.
You should all be offended to your core that the New York Times pays Lara Bazelon to insult your intelligence this way. Really.