Factchecking debate attacks on Sen. Harris
Sen. Kamala Harris’ best moments in the presidential campaign have been when she’s on offense, attacking her primary opponents and President Trump while flashing her prosecutorial chops.
But Harris was playing defense during this week’s Democratic primary debate as former Vice President Joe Biden and Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard attacked her tenure as San Francisco’s district attorney and California’s attorney general.
Here’s a look at what they said and the context behind their often vaguely worded attacks: The attack: Biden stumbled through the jab made about a scandal at the San Francisco
police crime lab while Harris was district attorney. His punch line was, “Along came a federal judge and said, ‘Enough, enough.’ And he freed 1,000 of these people.” The context: While Harris was district attorney in 2010, an investigation found that Deborah Madden, a police crime lab technician, stole and used some of the cocaine that she was supposed to analyze as evidence.
Even though the Police Department ran the lab, Madden would testify for prosecutors. San Francisco Superior Court Judge AnneChristine Massullo — not a “federal judge,” as Biden said — said Harris’ district attorney’s office violated defendants’ rights by hiding damaging information about the technician and was indifferent to demands that the office account for its failings. “The District Attorney failed to disclose information that clearly should have been disclosed,” the judge wrote in a court order. Plus, Harris’ office did not have a written policy about informing defendants if there were any problems with evidence or witnesses. The scandal led to 1,000 cases being dismissed. The attack: Gabbard said Harris “put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.” The context: The Gabbard campaign pointed to a February article in the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative media outlet, headlined, “Kamala Harris Packed California Prisons With Pot Peddlers” as attorney general. The article cited statistics from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation that said “at least 1,560 people were sent to state prisons for marijuanarelated offenses between 2011 and 2016 ” during the time Harris was the state AG. On Thursday, a department spokesman told The Chronicle that 1,974 people were admitted for hashish and marijuana convictions during that period.
Harris didn’t back legalizing cannabis for recreational use until last year, two years after California voters did. She also opposed a statewide ballot measure to legalize weed in 2010, when she was San Francisco’s district attorney and running to be state attorney general. Harris called that proposal “flawed public policy.”
And the laughing? Harris admitted to smoking weed in college during a radio show appearance in February and laughed when asked if she supported legalization. “Half my family’s from Jamaica. Are you kidding me?” Her father, who was born in Jamaica, wasn’t laughing when he heard about his daughter’s comments. Donald Harris wrote that his family “must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity” being connected with the “fraudulent stereotype of a potsmoking joy seeker.” The attack: Biden said Wednesday that when Harris was attorney general “there were two of the most segregated school districts in the country, in Los Angeles and in San Francisco. And she did not — I didn’t see a single solitary time she brought a case against them to desegregate them.” The context: Yes, both districts have struggled to better integrate. But it was difficult — and highly unusual — for a state attorney general at that time to file suit to desegregate a school, said Stanford law Professor Bill Koski, founder of the university’s Youth and Education Law Project.
A series of federal court decisions in the mid1990s made it much tougher to bring desegregation lawsuits, Koski said. Few state attorneys general even try.
“There was nothing she could really do in San Francisco to force the district to use raceconscious efforts to desegregate the schools. The legal standard would be very difficult to prove,” Koski said. “San Francisco has tried a lot of different things to make less segregated schools — it’s just a very difficult thing to do.” The attack: Gabbard said Harris “blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from Death Row until the courts forced her to do so.” The context: Gabbard is referring to the case of Kevin
Cooper, a Death Row inmate convicted of quadruple murder in 1983. Harris, during her tenure as attorney general, declined to use advanced DNA testing in the widely publicized case.
Last year, after the New York Times published an investigative piece on Cooper’s case, thenSen. Harris backtracked, saying, “I feel awful about this,” and that she hoped the governor would order the testing. In February, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered new tests. The results are pending.
The attack: Gabbard said Harris “kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California.”
The context: This is rooted in the 2011 Supreme Court case that said California’s prisons were too overcrowded. In 2014, lawyers working for the state Department of Justice told a court that if lowlevel offenders — who are often used to fight wildfires — were freed, it “would severely impact fire camp participation — a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought.”
In 2014, Harris said she didn’t know lawyers working for her had made that argument until she read published reports of it. Subsequently, she asked her staff to discontinue making that argument.