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Kamala is brilliant for being an overzealous prosecutor
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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.
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Lara BazelonDec 04, 2019
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, when she was San Francisco’s district attorney and then California’s attorney general. In truth, Harris’s record reveals that she is a centrist on criminal justice. Had she run on that record or reckoned with it—including acknowledging the harm her status-quo policies inflicted—the outcome might have been different.
It is understandable that Harris would want to claim the progressive prosecutor label—it is trending nationally now. It signals to voters that a candidate will break from the failed tough-on-crime policies of the past. In the last five years, reform-minded candidates across the country have run and won top prosecutor posts on a message of ending money bail, refusing to prosecute low level drug crimes, and vows to prosecute police officers who shoot unarmed civilians—who are almost always black and brown men.
Harris positioned herself as the original “progressive prosecutor.” She was first elected as San Francisco’s top prosecutor in 2004. As district attorney, she pledged to never impose the death penalty, defying the city’s police department and Democratic leaders who were clamoring for the execution of a 21-year-old who killed an undercover police officer. She later wrote a book called “Smart on Crime” that urged officials to abandon the “tough on crime” policies of the past and instead favor rehabilitation over punishment. By the standards of the time, claiming a “smart on crime” mantle was lonely territory for an elected prosecutor.
But 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.
Worshipers of Trump calling an opposing candidate ”scum” is so ironic, it’s just sad.
While I realize that Dems "worship" their politicians, you know, like Pelosi, Biden, that fake Native American, etc., we do not "worship" Trump.
Kamala Harris scum? Maybe not. Prostituted herself into higher positions after lowering herself to a man twice her age. Supports the termination of the lives of infants feeling it is the mother's choice whether or baby lives or not. Is trying to act like she understands what it was like and is like for black Americans, the ones that didn't have a medical researcher as a mother, and a father that was a professor at Stanford, and are not attorneys that have been really hard on people of color, even not allowing evidence to prevail.
Kamala Harris is a hater. She just is. I think she has to hate herself to be so vile. It spills from her pores. I don't think many people like her at all. Bad choice for the Dems.
Is she scum? That isn't what I call her, but I can't get past the "censor" her to post that.
I love these desperate Trumper threads, it just shows how scared they are
Agreed. I'm scared he may miss out on 330 EV's and only get 320 instead
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