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Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign advertises her as the good prosecutor, to distinguish her from former President Trump, whom they brand as the bad felon.
As San Francisco’s district attorney from 2004 to 2011 and California’s attorney general from 2011 to 2017, Harris has willingly – nay, eagerly – participated in the destructive criminal justice policies that have ruined the Golden State.
She is giving the Trump campaign a gift if she continues to rely on her terrible law enforcement record.
Vice President Kamala Harris attends an event in the Eisenhower Executive Office Buildings South Court Auditorium at the White House, June 3, 2021. (Reuters/Evelyn Hockstein)
In San Francisco, she was a rogue prosecutor long before George Soros started funding the soft-on-crime DAs who have wreaked havoc in our cities. She made a centerpiece of her program the protection of sanctuary city policies that shielded illegal aliens – including those with criminal records – from deportation, prosecution and the death penalty.
KAMALA HARRIS’ RECORD AS PROSECUTOR IN CALIFORNIA SPELLS ‘TROUBLE’ FOR PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN: LAWYER
For example, Harris put her personal policy preferences above the law and refused to seek the death penalty for Edwin Ramos Umaña, an illegal alien and MS-13 gang member. He previously had been convicted – but not deported – of crimes such as robbery and assault, including assaulting a pregnant woman.
On June 22, 2008, Ramos murdered Anthony Bologna, a grocery store night-shift manager, and his two boys, Michael and Matthew, as they were driving home from a family barbecue. Harris’ office dithered over the case and Ramos wasn’t even convicted until after Harris left office three years after the crime. Bologna’s widow and surviving children were forced into witness protection.
Harris again put her personal beliefs above the law when she refused to seek the death penalty against the killer of a police officer. On April 10, 2004, gang member David Lee Hill murdered San Francisco Officer Isaac Espinoza, who was only 29 years old, and severely wounded his partner, Officer Barry Parker.
Harris publicly announced that she would not seek the death penalty quickly after Hill’s arrest, angering career prosecutors, police officers and Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. In part because of Harris’ opposition to the death penalty, the jury found Hill guilty of second-degree murder, which usually carries a sentence of 15 years to life. Hill only received life without parole because California law imposes a mandatory sentencing enhancement for killing an on-duty police officer.
Worse yet, Harris showed that her personal views on crime would give way to her political ambitions.
She flip-flopped in 2014 when a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled California’s death penalty unconstitutional. As California’s attorney general, Harris appealed the ruling, in part making the weird argument that it “undermines important protections that our courts provide to defendants.”
She also flip-flopped on “Jessica’s Law,” which imposed harsher penalties on child molesters. Harris publicly supported Jessica’s Law in 2006 as San Francisco DA, but then when it became politically expedient, she ordered parole officers to ignore its restrictions on where sex offenders could live.
Beyond Harris’ elevation of her personal views above the law, she has taken delight in abusing her prosecutorial power. For example, as DA and AG she bragged about punishing parents with fines and jail time for truancy if their kids skipped school, along with collateral charges such as contributing to the delinquency of a minor and domestic violence.
The most vulnerable parents, of course, were those who were low-income, minority and/or disabled whose children attended public schools. Harris bragged that “as a prosecutor in law enforcement, I have a huge stick,” in order to frighten these families, and sent homicide and gang prosecutors to schools to scare both administrators and parents.
It didn’t work; according to the state Department of Education, overall truancy continued to rise.
But perhaps Harris’s worst prosecutorial behavior was fighting to keep innocent people in jail and to uphold wrongful and overturned convictions that had been secured through unconstitutional official misconduct such as perjury, evidence tampering, and hiding potentially exculpatory evidence.
For example, as DA, Harris violated the Constitution when she did not disclose to defense attorneys crucial information about a police laboratory employee who stole drugs from the lab, intentionally sabotaged its work, spent time in an alcoholic rehabilitation center, and had been convicted of assault and domestic violence.
Harris’ unconstitutional and unethical behavior was so egregious that more than 600 cases were dismissed and thousands more placed into question. The courts condemned her and her office for systemically violating defendants’ constitutional rights. Harris blamed the police and the judge for her choices.
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As AG, Harris continued violating the Constitution and defendants’ civil rights. For example, she insisted on keeping an innocent man, Daniel Larsen, in prison for an additional two years after a federal court threw out his conviction and found him “actually innocent.” Even after Larsen was finally freed, Harris continued to appeal and challenge his release.
Worse, she did her best to keep Efrain Velasco-Palacios in custody even though the court found that a local prosecutor had inserted a falsified confession into the transcript of a defendant’s statement. Harris argued that the court was wrong to describe it as “outrageous government misconduct” that “shocked the conscience” because the prosecutor’s evidence tampering didn’t involve “abject physical brutality.”
In a similar case, Baca v. Adams, the 9th Circuit slammed Harris at oral argument for defending a wrongful conviction which prosecutors unconstitutionally obtained by putting on perjured testimony from a jailhouse informant and a prosecutor, both of whom lied under oath. The 9th Circuit scolded Harris and her office so badly that she was forced to dismiss the case.
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These examples barely scratch the surface of Harris’ failures as the top prosecutor in San Francisco and then California. She has also selectively investigated and prosecuted entities for her own political benefit, failed to protect her female staff from sexual harassment by her top male aide, and overseen thousands of marijuana-related convictions which disproportionately affected Black and Latino communities, all while bragging about her own marijuana use in high school and college.
The more Harris invokes her prosecutorial record, the more she will raise doubts about her candidacy for the presidency.
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John Shu is a legal scholar and commentator who served in the administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.
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