Kamala Harris was very bad as the district attorney of San Francisco. Due to her policies, some murderers were never punished at all, while other killers spent only a short time in prison, even as harmless pot users ended up being prosecuted.
“When Kamala Harris became the DA after violating the campaign finance limits to out-raise and outspend her former boss, who did obey the limits, she immediately sent out mass ‘let’s make a deal’ letters to every defense lawyer with a pending murder case. These cases were almost all pled out to manslaughter or even lesser charges, and then Harris claimed these as convictions on murder cases for her closure rate. This is unheard of and set a tone of defense lawyers not taking her office seriously,” explains San Francisco lawyer Harmeet Dhillon.
“Kamala Harris’ incompetence got two gang violence witnesses killed, by housing them just across county lines. The bad guys found and killed them, the cases then fell apart. And scared witnesses then refused to testify against more bad guys,” Dhillon recounts. As a result, murderers ended up roaming free rather than being prosecuted.
“The Harris DA office’s ‘lack of conviction’ was a widely known joke in CA law enforcement circles. And everyone — especially the criminals — knew and exploited it,” Dhillon notes. “Kamala Harris manipulated the stats as DA by charging only” the easiest-to-prosecute “cases that were ‘trial ready’ in the first place — an absurd metric as most cases are built up after charging on a probable cause basis. Even so, her conviction rate was a joke,” Dhillon adds.
The 2009 felony trial conviction rate was only 76% in San Francisco, compared to 93% in Republican-controlled Orange County. Even though the San Francisco district attorney’s office only brought cases to trial where the defendant’s guilt was pretty obvious.
Kamala Harris employed people as prosecutors who did no work (and thus let criminals escape justice), as long as those people donated to her campaign. “While Harris was the DA in San Francisco, the supervisor in one of the criminal units was a no-show who literally phoned it in from San Diego, filling out fake time sheets from there where his boyfriend was. This went on for years, only ending under George Gascon’s tenure.”
“Another prosecutor in Kamala Harris’ DA office told” Dhillon “that the office, as policy, did not allege prior crime ‘strikes’ in indictments as is routinely done in other counties such as the one where the deputy DA had come from. This DDA was criticized for alleging strikes; only supervisors were allowed to authorize this and it was rarely done, yet another way Harris went soft on crime.”
“What does it mean when you don’t allege strikes?” Dhillon explains that “it means that a career criminal, a violent criminal, who commits multiple crimes gets two years instead of 25 to life. The prosecutor complained about this internally but it went nowhere.”
California law mandates longer sentences for repeat offenders, in Proposition 8 — which applies to repeat offenders who commit murder, rape, and robbery — and also in California’s Three Strikes Law. Prior crimes are known as “strikes.”
Harris flouted those laws, in refusing to allege prior strikes — as was required by state law. That was an example of Harris’s contempt for the rule of law, and her ideological hostility to anti-crime policies designed to protect victims of violent crimes. So while incompetence and laziness explain some of Harris’s soft-on-crime policies, other of Harris’s soft-on-crime policies are explained by ideological hostility, not mere incompetence or laziness.
