https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/opinion/kamala-harris-criminal-justice.html?
Loads more in the full story, please read it all before jumping in with hot takes. Harris is the kind of hardass law and order candidate who seems particularly ill-suited to the current moment and the Democratic base.
e. Well crap I forgot to finish the thread title. A mod edit with the headline would be appreciated. e2. Thanks.
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 of California, a likely presidential candidate and 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.
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."
In 2015, when the case reached the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, Ms. Harris's prosecutors defended the conviction. They pointed out that Mr. Gage, while forced to act as his own lawyer, had not properly raised the legal issue in the lower court, as the law required.
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.
Loads more in the full story, please read it all before jumping in with hot takes. Harris is the kind of hardass law and order candidate who seems particularly ill-suited to the current moment and the Democratic base.
e. Well crap I forgot to finish the thread title. A mod edit with the headline would be appreciated. e2. Thanks.
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