{UAH} WHY KAMALA HARRIS IS THE WRONG CHOICE FOR VP

Prosecuting Kamala Harris: Why she’s the wrong choice for VP

By ANISHA GUPTA

 

Kamala can't do. (MARCIO JOSE SANCHEZ/AP)

 

Dear Joe,

Not Kamala. Not now.

I grew up and attended law school in Kamala Harris-era California. She is a black woman (unlike me), but she is also a daughter of immigrants (like me), a woman of color (like me), and half South Indian (like me). Based on her identity and what that represents, Kamala should have my full support. But I chose to be a public defender; she chose to be a prosecutor. And in this moment, America does not need a prosecutor for vice president.

As a public defender, I saw firsthand that to be a prosecutor means covering up the misconduct of blue lives while criminalizing and caging black ones. I will never forget one of my first court appearances as a brand-new defender in the Bronx in 2014. One of my clients — a young black man arrested the previous night — was brought before the judge. He had blood on his clothes, a hospital bracelet on his wrist, and an unmistakable black eye. When the prosecutor saw him, she gasped.

 

“I hate these cases,” she said, giving my client a sympathetic look. Everyone in that courtroom understood my client’s only charge, resisting arrest, to be legal cover for the NYPD’s brutality — after-the-fact justification to conceal that the cops beat a black kid for no reason (a truth later borne out by cellphone video of his arrest).

Despite her “hatred” for these cases, the prosecutor nevertheless argued that my client should be jailed unless he could pay a cash bail few indigent defendants can afford. She did this despite the fact that every single police officer involved in the arrest had a history of using excessive force. Despite the fact that those cops wouldn’t receive so much as a verbal reprimand, let alone a day in jail for their violence.

Too often, this is what prosecutors do: shield police from accountability and ask black and brown folks to pay the price. This is what Harris did for decades.

Her office hid information that misconduct in a police crime lab tainted hundreds of drug convictions. She obstructed defense attorneys’ efforts to obtain disciplinary and conviction records of police officers with histories of misconduct. She oversaw a sham investigation that held no one accountable for Orange County’s illegal use of jailhouse snitches. She resisted calls to appoint special prosecutors when police were accused of crimes, despite the fact that local district attorneys are loath to go after the cops they work with.

What’s worse is she did all of that in progressive California in the 2000s — a time and place where she was often to the right of what even Republicans championed. And rather than atone for her regressive prosecutorial past, Harris has chosen to whitewash it.

She doesn’t get to do that. Not with her record. She doesn’t get to jail black and brown parents when poverty affects their children’s school attendance, then trade in the political currency of being bused to an integrated school as a child. She doesn’t get to defend capital punishment in California that condemns black people to death row at six times the rate of white people, then tout her moral opposition to the death penalty. She doesn’t get to slow-walk the release of prisoners from jails so overcrowded that the U.S. Supreme Court called them inhumane, then brag about her leadership fighting against mass incarceration.

I’m glad to see that Harris may be changing. But she has followed the political tide on this, not led it. America needs a leader who has shown us her entire career that black lives matter.

Prosecutors do not necessarily pull the trigger, but they frequently function as the getaway driver when police officers abuse or kill. And as defendants are told in criminal courtrooms around the country, the getaway driver is often considered just as guilty as the killer.

So please, Joe, not her. Not now.

 

Gupta is an attorney currently based in Washington.

EM         -> { Trump for 2020 }

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