by Eric Zuesse, The Duran:
This is a collage extracted from the best critical articles I’ve seen about Kamala Harris. It’s 9,500 words from articles boiled down to 2,400 words. All of these articles concern only domestic affairs — specifically the criminal-justice system, which is the field that Harris has specialized in. On international affairs, her record shows her to be consistently a neoconservative. Perhaps I’ll address that in a separate article.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
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Kamala Harris Was Not a ‘Progressive Prosecutor’
The senator was often on the wrong side of history when she served as California’s attorney general.
17 January 2019, by Lara Bazelon, law professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, where she directs the criminal and racial justice clinics. Before that, she was the director of the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent in Los Angeles. …
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. …
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 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).
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. 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.” …
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.
