Lara Bazelon has a profile of Kamala Harris’s years as a prosecutor in today's New York Times that should be required reading if you want to have context for the kinds of claims Harris makes about her politics and her record. Bazelon directs the Criminal Juvenile Justice and Racial Justice Clinical Programs at the University of San Francisco Law School.
In Kamala Harris’s recent memoir, Harris bills herself as a progressive prosecutor, noting, “America has a deep and dark history of people using the power of the prosecutor as an instrument of injustice.” Harris then 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.”
Harris then contrasts herself with this dismal history, billing herself as a “progressive prosecutor.”
Bazelon puts these claims to the test of what her office(s) did in specific circumstances and what resulted.
Consider her record as San Francisco’s district attorney from 2004 to 2011. 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 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. More than 600 cases handled by the corrupt technician were dismissed.
After Harris was elected Attorney General things didn’t get any better.
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. For this, she incurred criticism from an array of left-leaning reformers, including Democratic state senators, the A.C.L.U. and San Francisco’s elected public defender. The activist Phelicia Jones, who had supported Ms. Harris for years, asked, “How many more people need to die before she steps in?”
Bazelon is a lawyer and professor who has focused her career on the racial iniquities of America’s justice system. Bazelon has spent time on the trenches fighting these iniquities in precisely the place and time Kamala Harris was in charge of California’s Department of Justice. Bazelon knows what she is talking about on these issues. Here is Bazelon’s conclusion about Harris’s performance:
It is true that politicians must make concessions to get the support of key interest groups. The fierce, collective opposition of law enforcement and local district attorney associations can be hard to overcome at the ballot box. But 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.
Finally, Bazelon calls on Harris to make a radical break with her past, to apologize to the wrongfully convicted Harris fought to keep in prison and to do what she can now to make sure they get justice.
