Kamala Fought Tooth And Nail To Uphold Wrongful Convictions

Daniel Larsen

Harris’s actions in the Daniel Larsen case are particularly concerning. The Larsen case was a travesty of justice from start to finish. In 1999, when two police officers claimed they saw Larsen, who had earlier in his life been convicted for burglary, pull a six-inch-long knife from his waistband and throw it under a car, he was sentenced to twenty-seven years to life under the three-strikes law supported by Harris. Forget for a second that the sentence was unduly harsh for the crime in question. Police had wrongly targeted Larsen for a search in the first place, and witnesses reported that it wasn’t Larsen but the man he was with who had thrown the knife. In trial, Larsen’s incompetent lawyer (who would later be disbarred) didn’t investigate a single witness, nor present one in trial. Eleven years later, a judge reversed the conviction due to the lack of evidence and incompetence of Larson’s attorney’s. Yet two years later, Larsen was still in jail. Why? Because Harris, now a vocal opponent of mass incarceration, appealed the judge’s decision on the basis that Larsen had filed his paperwork too late — a technicality. Tens of thousands of people petitioned Harris to release Larsen, and numerous civil rights groups similarly called on her to do the right thing. But even when he was eventually released from custody after fourteen years, Harris challenged his release, and five months later Larsen was back in court, fighting to stay out of prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

George Gage

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.

Jamal Trulove

Jamal Trulove, got a $13.1 million settlement from San Francisco as compensation for the misconduct that led to his wrongful conviction and 50-year-to-life sentence in 2007. The head DA in SF at that time was Kamala Harris. The case against Trulove was shaky–it rested on a single eyewitness ID. One of Harris’ veteran deputies, Linda Allen, prosecuted Trulove. Her misconduct was so egregious that the appellate court called her closing argument a “yarn” made out of “whole cloth” and reversed. Once Trulove sued, more misconduct surfaced. It wasn’t just the DA, the SF police had coerced the witness into identifying Trulove. The police defended themselves in the lawsuit by saying that the SF DA knew what they did and had no problem with it.

The OC Snitch Scandal

When a judge removed the entire Orange County District Attorney’s Office from a death penalty trial in 2015—after it was revealed in a bombshell memo that the sheriff’s department had been running an unconstitutional jailhouse informant program—Harris’ office appealed the removal.

“Kamala Harris’ term as attorney general was disastrous for the Orange County criminal justice system,” said Assistant Orange County Public Defender Scott Sanders, who discovered the county’s misuse of jail informants. “She wanted to be seen as courageously taking on dishonest law enforcement.

“But four years later, no charges have been filed,” he said. “Harris and the A.G. have sent the message loud and clear that law enforcement answers to no one.”

Rafael Madrigal

Madrigal was wrongly convicted of attempted murder in Los Angeles County in 2002 and was serving 25 years to life when a federal judge dismissed the case and ordered him freed in 2009, ruling that Madrigal’s defense attorney was incompetent and failed to present evidence that would probably have led to a verdict of not guilty.

Attorney General Kamala Harris has recommended that Madrigal’s $282,000 claim be denied, with an attorney in her office filing a brief that argues over the circumstances in the case dismissed by the federal judge in granting Madrigal’s release.

Johnny Baca

Take the case of Johnny Baca, who was convicted for murder in state court in the ’90s.

“Basically, the state’s case turned on the testimony, in large part, of a jailhouse informant,” says Bazelon. “During the course of the litigation, one of the lead prosecutors in the case actually committed perjury in an effort to secure the conviction, which worked. Then Johnny Baca proceeded to go to federal court to try to get relief, and at that point it was up to Kamala Harris as the attorney general to defend that conviction or, in her discretion as a prosecutor whose mission is to seek justice, to move to vacate that conviction because it was tainted, and she chose the first path.”

Bazelon says that three appellate justices on the 9th Circuit ended up berating the prosecutor whom Harris sent in to defend the conviction. In the end, the judges ordered a retrial—something Bazelon credits to public pressure.

Kevin Cooper

Bazelon points to the case of Kevin Cooper, who is on death row in California. He was convicted of murdering four people but has always insisted he was innocent.

“His trial was infected by racism and corruption by the police,” says Bazelon. “When [Harris] was the AG and Kevin Cooper sought DNA testing—advanced testing to prove his innocence—she opposed it. Then Nicholas Kristof, the Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist, published an expose of Kevin Cooper’s case, and it went viral.”

After Kristof’s article was published, Harris reversed position and said that she would support DNA testing, which was ordered by former California Gov. Jerry Brown in late December.

San Francisco Crime Lab Scandal

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.

Efrain Velasco-Palacios

As California Attorney General, Harris’ office continued to display indifference toward concerns of misconduct. In March 2015, the California A.G. appealed the dismissal of a child molestation case after a Kern County prosecutor falsified an interview transcript to add an incriminating confession.

Harris’ office, citing state court precedent, tried to argue that the prosecutor’s action “was certainly conscience shocking in the sense that it involved false testimony by a prosecutor in a formal criminal proceeding. But it did not involve ‘brutal and … offensive’ conduct employed to obtain a conviction.” In other words, the defendant’s false confession wasn’t beaten out of him, and therefore didn’t violate his constitutional rights. The appeals court disagreed and threw out the conviction..

Harris defended the Kern County prosecutor after he falsified a defendant’s confession that was used to threaten a sentence of life in prison. The State Bar only suspended the Kern County prosecutor. Velasco-Palacios reoffended after prosecutor misconduct forced his release and was charged again for sex with a minor under fourteen.

Kamala Harris Ignored Calls To Probe Police Shootings

Alen Blueford

Mario Woods

Andy Lopez

Ezell Ford

Luis Góngora

Jessica Williams

Amilcar Perez-Lopez

Manuel Angel Diaz

Alex Nieto

Mitrice Richardson

Political Commentator Yvette Carnell and her Breaking Brown Youtube Show recently did a powerful interview with the father of Mitrice Richardson. For those that don’t recall Ms. Richardson an African American was found dead after being held in custody by the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department. Then California Attorney General Kamala Harris avoided reviewing the death for a long period, before finally taking on the case.

Based on the father’s statement to Carnell in the video below, that was only done by Harris to parade the investigation around as racial cover during the California Senate race. Because the day after Harris won she sent a letter to the Richardson family they would no longer look into the case.

Kamala Harris Fought Against Civil Rights

San Francisco’s public defender Jeff Adachi accused District Attorney Kamala Harris on Wednesday of refusing to turn over to defense lawyers the names of police officers with arrest records or misconduct histories whose trial testimony has helped to convict defendants.

Jeff Adachi, the public defender of San Francisco, twice urged Harris to open a civil rights investigation into the San Francisco police department, once after a police were caught sending racist and homophobic text messages and again a string of high-profile killings of young people of color by police. “I never received a response,” Adachi said in an email.

In 2016, when “dozens” of police officers had sex with teenager Celeste Gaup, committing statutory rape and engaging in human trafficking, Harris ignored the case. Numerous male officers across the Bay Area became embroiled in this sexual exploitation scandal.

The local district attorneys, which work closely with police departments, were slow to bring criminal cases, and when they did, the charges largely fell apart. A federal judge said the Oakland police department’s investigation into its own officers was “wholly inadequate”, but Harris did not launch her own investigation. The inaction was particularly shameful and hypocritical given her stated commitments on fighting trafficking and protecting exploited youth, activists said.

“We pleaded with her and pressured her to at least investigate, if not prosecute, some of the local police departments who had killed African American men and Latino men,” said Anne Butterfield Weills, a local civil rights lawyer. “She ignored us.”

Body Cameras

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 A.C.L.U. 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?”

Defender of the prison system

In 2014, she attempted to block the release of nonviolent second-strike offenders from overcrowded state prisons on the grounds that their paroling would result in prisons losing an important labor pool.

As the top lawyer for the prison system, Harris also defended the use of lengthy solitary confinement, despite evidence the practice causes long-term and severe harm to prisoners.

Though a settlement ultimately led to reforms, the years-long battle means Harris’s legacy includes extreme suffering for thousands of prisoners who were stuck in isolation during the court battle, said Weills. “They are broken people – psychologically, physically damaged.”

Truancy

Cash Bail

”For her entire career she used some of the highest money bail amounts to keep people in jail cells and saddle poor families with financial debt,” said Alec Karakatsanis, an attorney who has brought several legal challenges to California’s bail system, “and as soon as she had no influence on that issue practically, she announces she has a different view on it.”

Death Penalty

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).

Three Strikes

She did not take a position on the successful 2012 ballot initiative to amend the law. Adams said that Harris did did not weigh in on any state propositions when she was attorney general because she wrote the ballot language for the initiatives.

Her attorney general’s office also defended the law against a 2014 challenge in the state Supreme Court. Levin said that while it’s typical for the attorney general’s office to defend existing state laws, the attorney general is an independent elected official. “There’s nothing illegal about an attorney general saying, ‘you know what, I disagree.’”

Civil Asset Forfeiture

Harris was not merely “doing her job.” In 2011, she actively fought a California bill that would have curbed civil asset forfeiture. Four years later, she sponsored a bill to expand the abilities of prosecutors to seize assets of those charged with a crime prior to the commencement of criminal proceedings. That year, the state stole $50 million worth of private property and funds from California citizens.

Marijuana

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.

Felony Conviction Rate

Under District Attorney Kamala Harris, the overall felony-conviction rate in San Francisco rose from 52 percent in 2003 to 67 percent in 2006, the highest seen in a decade. Many of the convictions accounting for that increase stemmed from drug-related prosecutions, which also soared, from 56 percent in 2003 to 74 percent in 2006.

Covered for High-Profile Criminals

SFPD and the District Attorney’s office under California Attorney General Kamala Harris protected high-ranking gang-members-turned-informants from repercussions for criminal activity including drug trafficking, fraud, extortion, and weapons possession to assault and murder.

Kamala Harris failed to bring charges against embattled California utility PG&E after pipeline explosion. Now its consultants are helping run her campaign

FOSTA and Sex Workers

Last year, Harris, the former Attorney General of California, helped champion the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), a piece of legislation sex workers and advocacy groups warned would have a disastrous impact on sex workers’ lives—and they were right.

Men don’t have to agree to sex in order to get busted in a prostitution sting. They just have to seem interested.

Law professors say that the loitering statute is dangerously vague. In a group of cities surveyed, San Francisco was the only one in which men are regularly arrested for loitering. Police officers in charge of prostitution stings elsewhere say they would not consider a loitering arrest in some of the circumstances in which San Francisco police make arrests on a weekly basis.

Because 60 percent of the men arrested for loitering are Latino, San Francisco’s public defender, Jeff Adachi, said the issue raises “grave concerns” about possible discrimination, and that his office will investigate the situation.

The risk in using the loitering charge, lawyers say, is that the police may be arresting men who have no serious intent to engage in solicitation, and who pose no risk of future criminality.

The Salvadoran men who were cited for loitering were released with tickets, requiring a June 30 court date and a potential fine of $682 each. Neither of them had any sense of their legal options, or how they would defend themselves given their limited English.

“I’m going to fight it,” the 20-year-old said in Spanish. He said he did not want his name printed because of the shame associated with a solicitation charge. “If it were something I did, I would be like, ‘Fine.’ But we haven’t done anything.”

Immigration

Transgender Rights

In 2015, Harris’s office fought to stop a Michelle-Lael Norsworthy, a trans woman in California’s prison system prison, from getting reassignment surgery.

Kamala Refused To Go After “Foreclosure King” Steven Mnuchin

David Dayen

Back in January, after Donald Trump had nominated Steven Mnuchin as treasury secretary, I uncovered a leaked document from the California attorney general’s office that showed OneWest Bank repeatedly broke foreclosure laws under Mnuchin’s six-year reign as CEO and then chairman. Prosecutors in the state’s Justice Department wanted to file a civil enforcement action against the company for “widespread misconduct,” but the attorney general at the time, Kamala Harris, overrode the recommendation and declined to prosecute. She never gave a reason.

Misconduct Claim Involving Kamala Harris Aide Came To Agency Months Before She Left Office

The alleged incident occurred in 2016 when Wallace was working as the director of law enforcement under Harris, who was serving as the California attorney general at the time, the paper reported. Wallace’s settlement took place in May 2017, after Harris had been sworn-in as senator and he had been hired as a senior adviser, based in Sacramento.

Bizarre Fake Police Force Included Kamala Harris Aide

This week, the three people were charged with impersonating police officers. They are David Henry, who told Johnson he was the police chief, Tonette Hayes and Brandon Kiel, an aide to state Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris. The group, which claimed to be descendants of the medieval Catholic military order the Knights Templar, told Roosevelt their police agency had been in existence for 3,000 years and had sovereign jurisdiction in 33 states and in Mexico.

Critics Unhappy With Kamala Harris’ Approach To San Onofre Probe

Consumer advocate Charles Langley said Harris may not want to pursue the San Onofre investigation to its end because the state’s Democratic hierarchy could be touched by it and that could affect her U.S. Senate bid. “This is a scandal that will very likely implicate Gov. Jerry Brown, a powerful Democrat, and Michael Peevey, a powerful Democrat, and his wife, an elected powerful Democrat,” Langley said. “I think it’s very distressing to her when she’s running for U.S. Senate and going up against the Democratic Party structure.”

Kamala Harris Won’t Review Suicide Findings in Bizarre Death Medicis CEO Jonah Shacknai’s wife Rebecca Zahau

While the sheriff acknowledged there will always be those with questions and doubts, Keith Greer, the attorney for the Zahau family said the evidence clearly showed that Rebecca’s death was not a suicide. “The evidence here shows that the sheriff made an initial decision that is clearly wrong and stuck by that decision later. The only way that happens in my mind is one of two things or a combination of two things- one is incompetence and two is corruption,” Greer said.

Favored By The Establishment

Herbalife

DLA Piper

AIPAC

Willie Brown

The “ex-girlfriend” is California Senator Kamala Harris.

According to the San Francisco Weekly, Harris and Brown met in 1994 when he was speaker of the state Assembly. He was 60, she was 29.

Prior to her running for office, Brown appointed Harris to two patronage positions in state government, the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission. These positions paid handsomely, more than $400,000 over five years.

At one point Brown and Harris were the talk of the town.

Right before Brown was sworn in as Mayor of San Francisco, legendary San Francisco columnist Herb Caen implied that the self described “Ayatollah of the Assembly” and “a girlfriend” would soon get married. In his book, “Basic Brown,” Brown quoted his wife Blanche as responding to the column by saying, “Listen, she may have him at the moment, but come inauguration day and he’s up there on the platform being sworn in, I’ll be the b***h holding the Bible.”

The couple broke up, but the friendship and political alliance remained.

In 2003, Harris decided to run for district attorney of the city and county of San Francisco. Brown assisted this campaign by raising money on her behalf and introducing her to deep-pocketed donors.

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