Kamala Harris’ Prosecutor Past Returns to Haunt Her Campaign

Harris, who has attempted to frame the 2024 race against Donald Trump as a contest of “prosecutor versus felon,” will again have to answer difficult questions about her own history of keeping innocent people in prison.

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, ever since she began her campaign in late July, has frequently invoked her experience as both a prosecutor and the attorney general of California.

“In those roles,” Harris has said, “I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump's type.”

Yet Harris’ history as a prosecutor has proved a liability for her in the past, attracting criticism not just from the right, but from the left as well. The issue came up during Harris’ last bid for president, when in a July 2019 debate, she was taken to task by her fellow presidential candidate, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (HI-2).

Gabbard said that in the debate she was “deeply concerned” about Harris’ prosecutorial record, adding that Harris had “put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana. She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from Death Row until the courts forced her to do so. She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California, and she fought to keep a cash bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way.”

Harris pushed back against the attack, saying that she was proud of her prosecutorial record, but her response was generally seen as lacking. The brief debate exchange proved to be a turning point in Harris’ campaign; while she had previously been polling well among primary voters, and was widely considered a top-tier candidate, she subsequently began to lose momentum. In the end, Harris dropped out before a single vote had been cast in the 2020 Democratic primaries.

While a seminal debate-stage moment like this will be difficult to recreate in the 2024 general election, it is notable that the Trump campaign has enlisted Gabbard’s help in preparing for the upcoming debate between Trump and Harris.

But this was hardly the only occasion during that primary race when Harris faced heat from her own side over her prosecutorial record. Lara Bazelon, a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, stoked controversy in January 2019 when she penned an op-ed in The New York Times entitled “Kamala Harris Was Not a ‘Progressive Prosecutor.’”

Bazelon levels at Harris many of the same criticisms that Gabbard would later employ in the debate. Time after time,” Bazelon writes, “when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then the state’s attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent.”

Among other matters, Bazelon cites Harris’ support of legislation which allowed the state to arrest parents whose children were truant from school. More worryingly, though, Harris has a long history of fighting to uphold wrongful convictions.

One notable example of this was the case of George Gage, who was convicted of sexual abuse based primarily on the testimony of his stepdaughter. After Gage’s conviction, it was learned that the prosecuting attorneys had withheld evidence indicating that the accuser had a history of lying. When Gage’s attorney’s appealed the case, however, Harris’ office fought to uphold his 70-year sentence.

In addition to Gage’s case, Bazelon cites those of Daniel Larsen, Johnny Baca, and Death Row inmate Kevin Cooper. All three of these men were convicted of felonies based on faulty prosecutions; in all three of these cases, Harris again fought to uphold the convictions.

If Harris is serious about upholding justice, Bazelon writes, she “needs to radically break with her past” and “apologize to the wrongfully convicted people she has fought to keep in prison.”

Although this line of attack has shown itself to be one of the most electorally effective against Kamala Harris, it may prove difficult to use by the Trump campaign, which has taken a tough line on law and order. If Trump can manage to balance messaging centered around Harris’ past overzealousness with his own commitment to remaining tough on crime when necessary, however, then he may run a very successful campaign indeed.

One thing is clear: so long as Harris attempts to frame the 2024 election as a contest between a prosecutor and a felon, her own history in the former role will remain in play.