Prosecutor Kamala Harris

Her imprison-at-all-costs philosophy

A criminal prosecutor is charged with the responsibility to ensure justice is served. This occurs as the result of three actions. The first is a bedrock standard of American jurisprudence: ensure the accused receives a fair trial. This includes revealing all evidence to the defense. Since a 1963 Supreme Court ruling this includes evidence that can exonerate the accused. The second action is when there is the successful conviction of someone who has committed a criminal act. Finally, justice is also served when the innocent are exonerated and set free.

When she was the San Francisco district attorney (2004-2011) and California attorney-general (2011-2017), Kamala Harris employed a convict-and-incarcerate-at-all-costs philosophy, which included denying defendants a fair trial. Low-income black and brown-skinned defendants were disproportionately impacted by Harris’s harsh policies.

Caramad Conley had been incarcerated since 1992 when was finally given his freedom in 2011. He was serving two life-without-parole sentences for a double-murder. It was later learned the prosecution’s key witness lied on the stand, according to the judge reviewing the case. This newly-discovered fact led the judge to overturn Conley’s conviction. It turns out police officials were secretly paying the witness and offered him free use of a house in the months leading to his court testimony, and Harris’s office knew of the sketchy arrangement.

Despite these revelations, and rather than releasing Conley over this miscarriage of justice, then-District Attorney Kamala Harris kept Conley jailed and sought to retry him for murder. After a public outcry, Harris dropped the murder charges and Conley was freed in January 2011. The City of San Francisco paid him $3.5 million to settle a wrongful prosecution lawsuit.

In 2007, Priscilla Lualemaga claimed to be the only eyewitness to the fatal shooting of a relative. She insisted she witnessed the street murder late at night from her second story window from a good distance away. She tentatively identified the shooter from a police photo, but admitted she was uncertain if she was correct because the shooter had his back toward her and was running away.

Months later, police again met with Lualemaga and showed her a photo array they said included the man they claimed was the shooter. She identified the same person as the shooter this second time.

In October 2008, San Francisco arrested Jamala Trulove for the murder. He was not the individual Lualemaga identified. There was no physical or forensic evidence tying him to the scene. Yet, 15 months after his arrest and at his January 2010 trial, Lualemaga testified in court she was 100% certain Trulove was the shooter.

What changed in the interim between Lualemaga twice identifying a different suspect and her courtroom testimony identifying Trulove? The prosecutor’s office secretly paid about $60,000 toward Lualemaga’s living expenses. Disclosing this financial arrangement to the jury would have likely undermined her credibility as an eyewitness. Not only was this not disclosed but Lualemaga actually denied under oath she had received any money from the prosecutor’s office. Kamala Harris and police officials did not notify the judge of the witness’s false testimony.

Kamala Harris was in the courtroom when the jury delivered Trulove’s guilty verdict, he later recalled. Trulove said, “[S]he laughed. She literally just like kind of bust out laughing.”

Trulove’s conviction was overturned in 2014 due to the prosecutorial misconduct and he was granted a new trial. Trulove was quickly acquitted in the second trial in 2015 as there was no evidence linking him to murder. Jurors in a 2018 civil trial found two police officers fabricated evidence implicating Trulove, and they hid exculpatory evidence that proved his innocence. In March 2019, the City of San Francisco paid Trulove $13.1 million for his wrongful conviction.

 In 2010, Harris covered up a major scandal involving a police laboratory technician. An internal memo indicated prosecutors believed the unhappy lab technician was intentionally sabotaging her drug analysis work, making her results and courtroom testimony unreliable. Harris had a legal and ethical obligation to notify defense attorneys of this shocking development. She did not. She put a lid on it.

The lab technician had also been stealing and consuming some of the cocaine turned into the lab for testing. After the technician’s behavior become public, prosecutors were forced to dismiss charges in more than 1,000 drug cases. It’s unclear how many defendants may have been convicted using faulty lab evidence and testimony.

In 2010, San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi accused Harris of refusing to "turn over to defense lawyers the names of police officers with arrest records or misconduct histories whose trial testimony has helped to convict defendants." Adachi continued, “[Harris] is putting the privacy interests of police officers who have misconduct records and who have been convicted of crimes above the rights of citizens to a fair and honest trial."

This speaks to Harris’s obligation as prosecutor to ensure defendants receive a fair trial. Defense attorneys made the case the credibility of a police officer’s courtroom testimony can be called into question if there is sufficient evidence of misconduct.

Under the Supreme Court’s Brady rule (Brady v. Maryland) Harris had a legal obligation to disclose this information to the defense. But Harris employed a very effective, but dishonest and unethical work-around. She never requested testifying officers’s personnel records from the police departments nor did the departments volunteer the records. Harris then claimed ignorance of police misconduct. And defendants were deprived of exculpatory evidence.

In 1984, Jose Diaz was convicted of raping two women in 1983 and 1984. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison and was released in 1993 after serving nearly nine years. He was ordered to register as a sex offender. Diaz always maintained his innocence.

Diaz filed a habeas corpus petition based on the discovery of new evidence in 2012. The new evidence exonerated Diaz and tied an unknown serial offender known as the Hooded Rapist to the sexual assaults. Diaz had his convictions vacated.

Shortly after, Diaz applied for compensation from the State Victim Compensation and  Government Compensation Board for his wrongful conviction. However, then-state Attorney General Kamala Harris fought Diaz arguing his request was made too long after his 1993 release. It took a state judge in 2014 to rule the filing time limit for compensation began with the habeas corpus filing due to the new evidence in 2012, and not with his 1993 release from prison, as Harris had argued.

Diaz was awarded $305,300 equaling $100 for each of the 3,053 he was imprisoned for his wrongful conviction. Harris ordered Diaz register as a sex offender despite his exoneration of any sexual criminal offenses.

Rafael Madrigal was sentenced 25 years-to-life after his conviction for a July 2000 drive-by shooting. Madrigal had an alibi at the exact time the shooting took place. He was at work at that very moment nearly an hour away, according to his supervisor and corroborating eyewitnesses. The driver of the vehicle acknowledged in a recorded jailhouse conversation that Madrigal was not involved in the shooting.

Unfortunately for Madrigal, his defense attorney never called the vehicle driver nor his work supervisor to the stand to testify. Without the exculpatory evidence Madrigal was  convicted in 2002. In 2009, a federal judge granted Madrigal’s habeas corpus petition to consider the evidence his original trial attorney failed to introduce. Citing ineffective counsel, the judge overturned Madrigal’s conviction. Prosecutors, faced with a poor case built on conflicting and unreliable eyewitness accounts and his lock-tight alibi, dropped charges against Madrigal.

After his exoneration, Madrigal petitioned the State Victim Compensation and  Government Compensation Board over his wrongful prosecution. As attorney-general, Kamala Harris opposed his petition, arguing he did not sufficiently prove his innocence. In most cases, the compensation board defers to the attorney-general’s opinion, as they did in Madrigal’s case. He was denied compensation.

In May 2011, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Plata that California must reduce its prison population to 137.5% of the system’s designed capacity. In order to meet the court order, the state would need to identify about 5,000 nonviolent offenders for release. The Supreme Court took the highly unusual position of ordering mandatory prison releases because California’s woefully inadequate prisons were overcrowded leading to an Eight Amendment violation. California’s prison population was at more than 200% of capacity.

California Attorney-General Kamala Harris signaled she would defy the Supreme Court going so far as to making the absurd claim the high court did not have jurisdiction over the state. Rather than release the nonviolent offenders, Harris decided to send them to forest camps and use them to fight California’s wildfires.

Mark Hyman is an Emmy award-winning investigative journalist. Follow him on Twitter, Gettr, and Parler at @markhyman, and on Truth Social at @markhyman81.

His books Washington Babylon: From George Washington to Donald Trump, Scandals That Rocked the Nation and Pardongate: How Bill and Hillary Clinton and their Brothers Profited from Pardons are on sale now (here and here).