News Release

“Kamala Harris Was Not a ‘Progressive Prosecutor'”

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Before she was a senator, Kamala Harris was an attorney general and district attorney who acted in ways that could hardly be described as 'progressive,' Lara Bazelon writes.LARA BAZELON, lbazelon at usfca.edu, @larabazelon
Bazelon is an associate professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law and the former director of the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent in Los Angeles. She is author of Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction and writes on issues arising from wrongful convictions for Slate.

She said today: “Kamala Harris claims to be a champion of criminal justice reform. But as a prosecutor, first as San Francisco’s District Attorney and later as California’s Attorney General, she was anything but. She needs to make the case to the voters that her change of heart is genuine. Crucial to that case is reckoning with her past.”

Earlier this year, Bazelon wrote the New York Times op-ed  “Kamala Harris Was Not a ‘Progressive Prosecutor’” which states: “With the growing recognition that prosecutors hold the keys to a fairer criminal justice system, the term ‘progressive prosecutor’ has almost become trendy. This is how Senator Kamala Harris … a former prosecutor, describes herself.

“But she’s not.

“Time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then the state’s attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent. Most troubling, Ms. 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.

“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.

“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.)

“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. She laughed that year when a reporter asked if she would support the legalization of marijuana for recreational use. Ms. Harris finally reversed course in 2018, long after public opinion had shifted on the topic.

“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 ACLU 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?’

“Worst of all, though, is Ms. Harris’s record in wrongful conviction cases. …”