Senator Kamala Harris, former prosecutor, San Francisco District Attorney, and California Attorney General, recently announced that she’s running for President. Her poor record on criminal justice could come back to haunt her.
Criminal justice reform is the talk of the town (if that town is Washington, D.C.) but, it hasn’t always been that way. And, during the years where the issue was swept under the rug, some current members of Congress personally made the system more unfair and punitive, Harris was one such person.
For her to refer to herself as a “Progressive Prosecutor” is to either ignore the definitions of those words or to ignore her tenure in that role. Punitive she was, but progressive not so much.
When Harris was District Attorney in San Francisco, her office violated the rights of defendants by covering up important information about a lab technician with a history of falsifying test results.
For a woman who has been the face of the criminal justice system and all of its flaws for so many to pick up the mantle of reform as though it had been her life’s work is painfully hypocritical. She’s been criticized for this from across the ideological spectrum, from the leftist Jacobin to the libertarian Reason Magazine, to the more conservative Fox News. The questions that have come periodically throughout her tenure in the Senate are being brought up again, this time with insistence.
After announcing her candidacy, Harris, when questioned about decisions she had made during her work within the criminal justice system, that “I take full responsibility for those decisions”. She is obviously aware of her albatross. Her work back in California will stick with her on the national stage. Its weight will be hers to bear and may be enough to sink the presidential hopeful, especially in a primary that is set on taking itself farther left.
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