Date: Friday, 02 August 2024
https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/the-negative-sides-of-kamala-harris
https://theduran.com/the-negative-sides-of-kamala-harris/
The Negative Sides of Kamala Harris
Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)
This is a collage extracted from the best critical articles I’ve seen about Kamala Harris. It’s 9,500 words from articles boiled down to 2,400 words. All of these articles concern only domestic affairs — specifically the criminal-justice system, which is the field that Harris has specialized in. On international affairs, her record shows her to be consistently a neoconservative. Perhaps I’ll address that in a separate article.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/opinion/kamala-harris-criminal-justice.html
Kamala Harris Was Not a ‘Progressive Prosecutor’
The senator was often on the wrong side of history when she served as California’s attorney general.
17 January 2019, by Lara Bazelon, law professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, where she directs the criminal and racial justice clinics. Before that, she was the director of the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent in Los Angeles. …
Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors. …
Ms. Harris was criticized in 2010 for withholding information about a police laboratory technician who had been accused of “intentionally sabotaging” her work and stealing drugs from the lab. After a memo surfaced showing that Ms. Harris’s deputies knew about the technician’s wrongdoing and recent conviction, but failed to alert defense lawyers, a judge condemned Ms. Harris’s indifference to the systemic violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights. …
Ms. 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.
Ms. Harris was similarly regressive as the state’s attorney general. When a federal judge in Orange County ruled that the death penalty 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 to defendants.” (The approximately 740 men and women awaiting execution in California might disagree).
The activist Phelicia Jones, who had supported Ms. Harris for years, asked, “How many more people need to die before she steps in?”
Worst of all, though, is Ms. Harris’s record in wrongful conviction cases. Consider George Gage, an electrician with no criminal record who was charged in 1999 with sexually abusing his stepdaughter, who reported the allegations years later. The case largely hinged on the stepdaughter’s testimony and Mr. Gage was convicted.
Afterward, the judge discovered that the prosecutor had unlawfully held back potentially exculpatory evidence, including medical reports indicating that the stepdaughter had been repeatedly untruthful with law enforcement. Her mother even described her as “a pathological liar” who “lives her lies.” …
The appellate judges acknowledged this impediment and sent the case to mediation, a clear signal for Ms. Harris to dismiss the case. When she refused to budge, the court upheld the conviction on that technicality. Mr. Gage is still in prison serving a 70-year sentence.
That case is not an outlier. Ms. Harris also fought to keep Daniel Larsen in prison on a 28-year-to-life sentence for possession of a concealed weapon even though his trial lawyer was incompetent and there was compelling evidence of his innocence. …
She also defended Johnny Baca’s conviction for murder even though judges found a prosecutor presented false testimony at the trial. She relented only after a video of the oral argument received national attention and embarrassed her office.
And then there’s Kevin Cooper, the death row inmate whose trial was infected by racism and corruption. He sought advanced DNA testing to prove his innocence, but Ms. Harris opposed it. (After The New York Times’s exposé of the case went viral, she reversed her position.) …
In “The Truths We Hold,” Ms. Harris’s recently published memoir, she writes: “America has a deep and dark history of people using the power of the prosecutor as an instrument of injustice.”
She adds, “I know this history well — of innocent men framed, of charges brought against people without sufficient evidence, of prosecutors hiding information that would exonerate defendants, of the disproportionate application of the law.”
All too often, she was on the wrong side of that history. …
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https://theappeal.org/kamala-harris-criminal-justice-record-killed-her-presidential-run/
KAMALA HARRIS’S CRIMINAL JUSTICE RECORD KILLED HER PRESIDENTIAL RUN
Harris’s record as a prosecutor was representative of a politics of the past. The nation has moved on.
4 December 2019, by Lara Bazelon
News broke on Tuesday that Kamala Harris was ending her run for president. While there are a number of reasons her candidacy was not successful, chief among them was her decision to brand herself a “progressive prosecutor.” She was not, at least not by today’s standards.
The Achilles heel for the Harris campaign has been a perceived lack of authenticity. There is no better example of the gap between public presentation and historical record than her mischaracterization of who she was and what she did from 2004-2015. …
Harris fell behind the curve over the past fifteen years, as the nation’s sense of the scope and moral urgency of needed reforms to the criminal legal system — and especially to the role of elected prosecutor — shifted dramatically. The shift revealed that Harris’s brand of “progressive prosecution” was really just “slightly less-awful prosecution”—a politics, and set of policies, that still meant being complicit in securing America’s position as the world’s leading jailer. As attorney general, she weaponized technicalities to keep wrongfully convicted people behind bars rather than allow them new trials with competent counsel and prosecutors willing to play fair. One of them, Kevin Cooper, is on death row. Another, George Gage, will die in prison without intervention from the governor. In both cases, Harris had the power to change the outcome. She could have demanded DNA testing in Cooper’s case. She refused. She could have conceded Gage’s conviction was based on the prosecutor’s decision to suppress evidence that devastated the credibility of the sole witness against him. She didn’t.
Harris also failed to hold police and prosecutors accountable for misconduct. In Orange County, where a sprawling jailhouse informant scandal has robbed countless people of their right to a fair trial, her lack of meaningful oversight has contributed to a crisis of legitimacy that continues to upend the county’s criminal justice system.
In 2015, when called upon by the Legislative Black Caucus to support bills that would have mandated that all police officers wear body worn cameras and that the Attorney General’s office investigate lethal officer-involved shootings, she declined. She championed a law that went after the parents of chronically truant children, laughed when asked if marijuana should be legal, and supported a system that locks up people who are too poor to post exorbitant money bail. These policies were part and parcel of a system of mass incarceration that has deeply harmed poor people and communities of color.
Harris was dogged throughout her campaign by questions about her troubling acts and, perhaps more importantly, failures to act — declining to take bold stances that would have angered law enforcement officials. Rather than admit the obvious, she doubled down, insisting that she had always been a reformer of a broken system. The truth is that Harris embraced progressive criminal justice policies only when it was safe to do so, including from her seat in the U.S. Senate, after they had become popular. …
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https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/01/instead-of-fighting-poverty-kamala-harris-waged-war-on-the-poor/
Instead Of Fighting Poverty, Kamala Harris Waged War On The Poor
1 September 2020, by John Clark
Since public defenders often juggle hundreds of cases at a time, it is practically impossible for a defense attorney to adequately defend each client. To make matters even worse, public defense offices are often meagerly funded by governments and therefore cannot afford to hire investigators and expert witnesses. Prosecutors, on the other hand, usually have plenty of experts on their payrolls.
Although there are defense attorneys who work tirelessly and heroically for their poor clients, they often simply lack the resources to mount a proper defense, so plea bargains are common. The vast majority of criminal cases in America are against poor people, and a recent study illustrated that 98 percent of felony cases in California were either plea bargained or not contested at all. Cases against poor people are “easy wins” for district attorneys.
Some people reading this might say, “Well, this is because it’s poor people who commit crimes.” Is it? For just one example, consider this. Poor neighborhoods in America are routinely subject to raids, while $50,000-tuition-per-year college campuses — places where drug use, rape, and underage drinking are notoriously commonplace — experience few arrests and even fewer convictions. Why? Largely because it’s much harder to convict someone who has the best legal representation that money can buy.
My brother, Paul Clark, a public defender for poor people in Alaska, notes:
Simply due to their inability to pay even small fines, poor people routinely go to jail, then lose their jobs and lose licenses. When they cannot pay a fine, additional penalties attach, and things get worse and worse. And all this often happens for minor infractions, such as failure to wear a seat belt. …
On Cash Bail
One of the most obvious injustices toward the poor in America is the cash bail system. Wealthy people can often afford cash bail and therefore walk free before trial. Poor people often cannot afford bail and therefore must sit behind bars for hours or days before their trials (or plea bargains).
To address this inequity, one might seek the elimination of cash bail or at least a lowering of the expense. Instead, as San Francisco district attorney, Harris pleaded to raise bail costs — using the logic that criminals were traveling to San Francisco to commit crime in a place they knew bail was low. As California attorney general, Harris again argued in favor of cash bail.
Harris has recently come out in favor of bail reform, but this new stance contradicts many years of her actual record as DA and AG. Noting Harris’ record, Harvard Law grad and civil rights attorney Alec Karakatsanis points out, “For her entire career, she used some of the highest money bail amounts in the country to keep people in jail cells and saddle poor families with financial debt.”
On Overturning Wrongful Convictions
It has been well-documented that some people were wrongfully convicted during Harris’s tenure and could have been exonerated after their convictions, but Harris stood in the way. …
On Truancy
Perhaps every attorney general and DA choose individual points of emphasis for law enforcement. For Harris, a major point of emphasis was truancy — any unexcused absence from school. As San Francisco DA, Harris bragged that she “intended to prosecute parents for truancy.”
In her inauguration speech as California attorney general, she specifically highlighted truancy again, saying, “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.”
Harris notes she helped craft a bill that made chronic truancy a misdemeanor for the parents of the student. That bill defined “chronic truant” as a student who had unexcused absences for “10 percent or more of the school days in one school year.”
You might guess that this would carry a $50 fine, and maybe a graduated fine of, say $100 or $200 for second and third offenses. False. This bill, which specifically included “kindergarten” students, made chronic truancy a misdemeanor punishable by a fine up to $2,000 and/or one year in prison. Since the passage of this bill, various municipalities of California have conducted “truancy sweeps,” which often result in the parents being led away in handcuffs to prison, where they struggle for bail money and good legal representation. …
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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kamala-harris-truancy-arrests-2020-progressive-prosecutor_n_5c995789e4b0f7bfa1b57d2e
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/69Bhz
The Human Costs Of Kamala Harris’ War On Truancy
The "progressive prosecutor" wanted to transform how California responded to students missing school. Parents like Cheree Peoples wound up paying the price.
27 March 2019, by Molly Redden
“You would swear I had killed somebody,” the woman, Cheree Peoples, said in a recent interview.
In fact, Peoples had been arrested for her daughter’s spotty school attendance record under a truancy law that then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris had personally championed in the state legislature. The law, enacted in January 2011, made it a criminal misdemeanor for parents to allow kids in kindergarten through eighth grade to miss more than 10 percent of school days without a valid excuse. Peoples’ 11-year-old daughter, Shayla, had missed 20 days so far that school year.
The law was the capstone of Harris’ yearslong campaign to get “tough” on truancy, the term for when a child consistently misses school without a valid excuse. Harris’ involvement began in the mid-2000s, when the future senator and 2020 presidential candidate was the San Francisco district attorney. …
She persuaded the state legislature to adopt harsher penalties for truancy. Under the new law, the parent or guardian of a young, truant child could face a fine of $2,500 or more — or one year in jail. Harris pushed hard for the law as she was running for attorney general, and it passed just as she won the election.
“We are putting parents on notice,” Harris said at her 2011 inauguration. “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.” …
Shayla frequently missed school because she was in too much pain to leave the house or was hospitalized for long-term care. Her school was aware of these circumstances; it had records on file from the regional children’s hospital explaining that Shayla’s condition would necessitate unpredictable absences and special educational accommodations. …
Harris has since replaced her punitive stance with the message that parents of truant children need help, not scare tactics. It’s a shift that happened roughly in step with voters’ waning tolerance for using the criminal justice system to address complicated social problems and Harris’ own preparations to seek higher office. …
Yet the penalties she once championed for truancy and the way she originally thought about the issue are foundational to how California handles truancy today. Peoples’ arrest wasn’t a freak occurrence ― it was the inevitable outcome of Harris’ campaign to fuse the problem of truancy with the apparatus of law enforcement. And Peoples is far from an outlier. There are still hundreds of families across California entering the criminal justice system under the aegis of Harris’ law. …
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
