Democratic Primaries
Showing Original Post only (View all)NYT Opinion: Kamala Harris Was Not a 'Progressive Prosecutor' [View all]
This is a paywalled article by professor Lara Bazelon that appeared in the New York Times on Jan. 17, 2019. NYT: "Ms. Bazelon is a law professor and the former director of the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent in Los Angeles." To respect the DU rule I selected four out of two dozen paragraphs:
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Time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then the states 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 Franciscos 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. Harriss deputies knew about the technicians wrongdoing and recent conviction, but failed to alert defense lawyers, a judge condemned Ms. Harriss 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.
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Ms. Harris was similarly regressive as the states 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).
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And then theres Kevin Cooper, the death row inmate whose trial was infected by racism and corruption. He sought advanced DNA testing to prove his innocence, but Ms. Harris opposed it. (After The New York Timess exposé of the case went viral, she reversed her position.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/opinion/kamala-harris-criminal-justice.html
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There are more examples but basically it boils down to Harris consistently taking positions that were politically convenient rather than progressive or just, including her defense of the death penalty. Also regarding Kevin Cooper: Bazelon mentioned in her NPR "On the Media" segment that Harris refused to allow exculpatory DNA testing until Jerry Brown finally intervened at the end of his term to allow it. And by that time she was out of office.
Note to jury: this is an New York Times op-ed, not a RW source, and the professor makes her case based on facts from a progressive point-of-view. There is nothing RW or defamatory about it.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden