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First, let’s look at her
role as Attorney General. She was the head of the nation’s
largest justice department outside of the U.S. government’s
Department of Justice. Harris’ responsibilities included a
$1.04 billion dollar budget along with 1,100 Attorneys and
,3600 non-attorney staff members, which totals 4,700
employees under her supervision.
Common sense says it was
impossible for her to be intimately involved in every case,
especially in a state with 40 million people in its
population. Some of us can hardly keep up with a family of
two children and a thousand-dollar budget. Now imagine the
number of cases that come through that office, daily.
Secondly, let’s take a
look at the timeline in question. In the first place, some
of the cases in question may have never reached Harris’ desk
and even those that did may have preceded her tenure by
decades. Here’s a case in point, the Kevin Cooper case was
the subject of a rumor on social media alleging that Harris
withheld key evidence. As the rumor goes, that evidence
would have proven Cooper’s innocence for a murder he was
convicted of in 1985. However, that case was initially
litigated 26 years before Kamala was Attorney General.
Furthermore, during this 26-year period, Cooper’s defense
team had lost numerous appeals; was denied clemency by then
Governor Schwarzenegger and had DNA testing done that upheld
his conviction. In the Cooper case, the items tested were
picked by his defense, which later argued it was planted.
Although Harris’ office did refuse to have additional
testing done, after decades of appeals; she has since even
advocated for this type of the advance testing.
Another story of
misinformation was circulated via a meme posted on social
media which claimed that Kamala Harris locked up the most
Black men in California’s history and that she was
instrumental in building the private prison industry. Let’s
examine that story!
History shows that
private prisons benefitted greatly from the ‘War On Drugs,’
which began in 1970 under the Nixon administration. In the
1970s Kamala was six years old. By most accounts, private
prisons opened in 1984, when Harris was a sophomore in
college. By the time she began her career as an assistant in
the DA’s office in San Francisco, mandatory minimum laws
were already on the books.
Then in 1994 when the
three-strike laws and the Omnibus Crime Bill took effect,
Kamala Harris had taken a leave of absence for four years to
work another job and didn’t return until 1998. Keep in mind,
from 1985 until 15 years later in 2000, Black men were being
incarcerated in record rates more than any other period of
time in American history except during slavery.
This is just to name a few
significant stories that led to the misinformed critical
oversight of Harris’ career. Another instance of how
popular misleading stories and rumors circulate about
Kamala, is the blatant lie that Harris was involved with the
Oscar Grant case, despite the fact that Harris was never DA
in Alameda County. Tom Orloff was District Attorney when
Grant was killed in 2009 by one of the city’s transit
officers. This story was captured in the film Fruitvale
Station starring actor Michael B. Jordan.
Lastly, in the case of
Jamal Trulove, Kamala Harris was rumored to have given a
witness $63,000 dollars. In this situation, Harris didn’t
even try the case. The details also revealed a common
practice while in protective custody, which is the courts
pay for witnesses’ expenses such as housing and meals. That
is why Harris wasn’t even named in the lawsuit after the
courts reversed his case.
Unfortunately, it’s
obvious that we as a people still have many hills to climb.
To conquer those obstacles will depend largely on rather or
not we can somehow find it within ourselves to work together
collectively and support each other in truth.
Consider a common insect,
ants. The only time you see ants doing nothing is when they
die. So, we have a lot of work ahead of us because the hard
work of justice is ongoing! Clearly, with that in mind, it’s
simple…Vote or Die!
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