Kamala Harris as a prosecutor

Kamala Harris as a prosecutor in San Francisco includes multiple betrayals of police and a soft-on-violent-crime that harmed many innocent victims:

• Harris refused to seek the death penalty for a gang member who shot a dozen bullets with an AK-47, killing a young police officer who had a family. Even liberal Democrat Sen. Diane Feinstein was sharply critical of Harris
• Harris reneged on a campaign promise and agreed not to seek jail time for those who assault cops:

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“This was Kamala’s first flip-flop,” said one former San Francisco cop who remembered the situation well. “We felt betrayed.” ... Harris said misdemeanor assault on a cop could qualify for pre-trial diversion and that punching a police officer could be remediated with counseling and other services — instead of jail time. “The bottom line is that if a suspect assaults a police officer, he should go to jail, not to class,” said San Francisco police Capt. Kevin Cashman at the time — who noted that punching a prosecutor would still be an immediate one-way ticket to state prison.

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Prosecutorial career

The City of San Francisco official "poop map" to warn tourists of areas to avoid due to reportings of human feces on the street covers Democrat Speaker Nancy Pelosi's 12th Congressional district.

Harris was elected San Francisco District Attorney in 2003.

In April 2004, San Francisco Police Department Officer Isaac Espinoza was shot and killed in the line of duty. Three days later, Harris announced she would not seek the death penalty, infuriating the San Francisco Police Officers Association. During Officer Espinoza's funeral, Sen. Dianne Feinstein rose to the pulpit and called on Harris, who was sitting in the front pew, to secure the death penalty, prompting a standing ovation from the 2,000 uniformed police officers in attendance. Harris still refused. Officer Espinoza's killer was convicted of the murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Harris refused to seek the death penalty for an illegal alien and alleged MS-13 gang member accused of a triple homicide.

In 2012, a Superior Court Judge ruled that San Francisco District Attorney Harris's office violated defendants' rights by hiding damaging information about a police crime lab technician, and was indifferent to demands that it account for its failings.

Harris opposed San Francisco's Proposition K ballot initiative to legalize prostitution. Harris said,

“I think it’s completely ridiculous, just in case there’s any ambiguity about my position. It would put a welcome mat out for pimps and prostitutes to come on into San Francisco.”

Harris argued prostitution exposes girls and women to drug, gun and sexual crimes, and “compromises the quality of life in a community.” Harris noted that 65 percent of cases handled by her department's sexual assault unit involved sex workers as victims.

Harris filed an amicus brief in District of Columbia v. Heller, arguing that the Washington, D.C., gun law at issue did not violate the Second Amendment.

Harris was elected Attorney General in 2010.

Prison overcrowding

After the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Plata (2011) declared California's prisons so overcrowded they violated prisoners' Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment, Harris fought federal court supervision. When California failed to fully implement the court's order to reduce overcrowding, and was ordered to implement new parole programs, the State of California appealed the decision, and in court filings Harris's office argued that if forced to release these inmates early, prisons would lose an important source of slave labor. Prisoners in California earn between 8 and 37 cents per hour in maintenance and kitchen jobs; prisoners fighting California wildfires receive $1 per hour.

Direct democracy

In 2008 the people of California passed Proposition 8, the state's referendum on same-sex marriage by an overwhelming popular vote. Harris refused to defend Proposition 8 in court. The decision was significant. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that proponents of the measure did not have the legal standing to defend Proposition 8 on appeal after Harris refused to do so. The case was dismissed by the U.S. Supreme Court, removing the ban on same-sex marriage in California. These actions were a blow to direct democracy.

She supported the Obama administration's Executive Orders on transgenders.

Jessica's Law

Harris refused to enforce Jessica's Law, requiring residency restrictions on sex offenders.

Inmate sex change operations

Main article: Transgenderism

In 2015 a male inmate of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation was paroled early. The inmate had sued the state in federal court claiming he was being denied a sex change operation. The court ordered the state to provide the inmate with the requested medical services. Harris represented the Department of Corrections and appealed the decision. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals opined the inmate was released early while the case was on appeal to render the case moot.

Three Strikes Law

Daniel Larsen, found innocent by a federal judge, had been in prison for 13 years. In 1999, when two police officers claimed they saw Larsen, who had earlier in his life been convicted for burglary, pull a six-inch-long knife from his waistband and throw it under a car, he was sentenced to twenty-seven years to life under the three-strikes law supported by Harris.

Police wrongly targeted Larsen in the first place, and witnesses reported that it wasn't Larsen but the man he was with who had thrown the knife. In the trial, Larsen's incompetent lawyer (who would later be disbarred) didn't investigate a single witness, nor present one in trial.

Eleven years later, a judge reversed the conviction due to the lack of evidence and incompetence of Larson's attorneys. Yet two years later, Larsen was still in jail. Harris appealed the decision on the basis that Larsen had filed his paperwork too late.

Tens of thousands of people petitioned Harris to release Larsen, and numerous civil rights groups similarly called on her to do the right thing. But even when he was eventually released from custody after fourteen years, Harris challenged his release, and five months later Larsen was back in court, fighting to stay out of prison for a crime he didn't commit.

Foreclosure crisis

See also: Financial Crisis of 2008

When Harris took office in 2011, California was still reeling from the effects of the subprime mortgage crisis. In 2012, she participated in the National Mortgage Settlement against five banks, securing for homeowners weighed down by average debt of close to $65,000 each — around $1,500 to $2,000 each. One called it “a slap in the face for a lot of us.” Under the deal, loans owned by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac didn't qualify for the debt relief. Given they were the country's biggest mortgage holders, this meant even fewer homeowners stood to benefit from the deal. Only 84,102 California families had any mortgage debt forgiven — far short of the 250,000 originally predicted.

Writing in the LA Times, Michael Hiltzik savaged the deal and what he called the “rosy self-congratulation” that followed it, particularly the new foreclosure standards it imposed, which he called a “big whoop.” “The provisions mostly require mortgage lenders and servicers to comply with what I would have thought was already the law, which prohibits, you know, criminal fraud,” he wrote.

Harris opened her Mortgage Fraud Strike Force to much fanfare in 2011. It employed twenty-five Department of Justice lawyers and investigators with a budget of more than $2 million to go after foreclosure fraud. The strike force managed to prosecute just ten cases in three years, an East Bay Express investigation in 2014 found.

The paper found that not only had the strike force prosecuted fewer foreclosure fraud cases than many other states, but it had filed fewer lawsuits than attorneys general in smaller states with fewer victims, and even fewer than some county district attorneys. Yet California led the country in terms of such scam operations, with many thousands of complaints since 2010. One housing rights activist who had lost his home in a fraud called the strike force a “public relations effort.”

The Intercept obtained a 2013 memo to Harris from prosecutors in the attorney general's office saying they had “uncovered evidence suggestive of widespread misconduct” at OneWest bank, and urging Harris to “conduct a full investigation of a national bank’s misconduct and provide a public accounting of what happened.” Yet Harris never did. In 2016, Steven Mnuchin donated $2,000 to Harris's campaign, making her the only 2016 Senate Democratic candidate to get cash from Mnuchin.

Refused to investigate police sex trafficking ring

An underage sex-trafficking scandal implicated dozens of police officers and other local authorities throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. Oakland went through two police chiefs trying to address it, with a third doing only questionably better. People were pleading for Harris's office to step in and oversee an independent investigation, since local governments seemed more motivated to quash a public relations nightmare than punish public officials. Harris and her office refused to intervene.

Prosecutorial misconduct

In 2015, Harris defended convictions obtained by county prosecutors who had inserted a false confession into an interrogation transcript, committed perjury, and withheld evidence. A federal appeals court threw out the convictions, telling Harris's lawyers, "Talk to the attorney general and make sure she understands the gravity of the situation."

Harris appealed the dismissal of an indictment when it was discovered a Kern County prosecutor perjured in submitting a falsified confession as court evidence. Harris asserted that prosecutorial perjury was not sufficient to demonstrate prosecutorial misconduct.

Religious discrimination

A Sikh man was barred from working as a prison guard because of his religiously mandated beard. Harris argued that his beard prevented him from being properly fitted with a gas mask, thus disqualifying him from the job, despite California's corrections and rehabilitation department's regulations allowing guards to have beards for certain medical reasons. A number of civil rights and legal organizations wrote Harris a letter pointing out this inconsistency. She argued that the medical exemption only applied to guards who passed the mask fitting before the policy took effect, although the man's attorney said this was untrue.

External links

• Tulsi Gabbard challenges Kamala Harris record as a prosecutor, video