It is a long and detailed item, beginnng:
She’s running for president as a progressive, but as attorney general of California, she criminalized truancy — making it a crime for kids to be late for school and dragging into the criminal justice system even more disproportionately low-income, predominantly black and Latino families. She’s overlooked the misconduct of her prosecutors and fought to uphold their wrongfully secured convictions. She defended California’s choice to deny gender reassignment surgery to a transgender inmate, and in 2014, she appealed a federal judge’s holding that the death penalty was unconstitutional.
The list goes on and on. But in some ways, the details don’t matter. The problem isn’t that Harris was an especially bad prosecutor. She made positive contributions as well, encouraging education and re-entry programs for ex-offenders, for instance. The problem, more precisely, is that she was ever a prosecutor at all.
To become a prosecutor is to make a choice to align oneself with a powerful and fundamentally biased system. As Paul Butler, former prosecutor and author of “Chokehold: Policing Black Men,” told The Guardian, “as a lawyer who went to law school with a goal of helping black people and using my legal skills to make things better, the realization that the law itself was a mechanism to keep African-American people down was frightening.” He added, “Lawyers are competitive and ambitious, and the way that manifests itself in a prosecutor’s office is you want to get tough sentences. I got caught up in that world. You feel like you’re doing the Lord’s work — you tell yourselves that you’re helping the community.” But, he vividly recalls, the expectation is far from reality.
Compare his self-reflection with Harris’s reply when asked about her decision to become a prosecutor: “There is a duty and responsibility to be a voice for the most voiceless and vulnerable and to do the work of justice. And that’s the work I wanted to do.”
Harris’s response might be understandable coming from someone with less experience — a layperson, a law student, or even a junior district attorney. But who, especially in the era of Black Lives Matter, would flatly describe the enforcement arm of the criminal justice system as doing “the work of justice”?
[links omitted] Subsequently in the item Gray does a compare/contrast flaying of Harris:
Harris’s choices are thrown in a more unflattering light when compared to the relatively short tenure of former public defender and civil rights lawyer Larry Krasner, district attorney of Philadelphia.
In his first week, Krasner fired 31 prosecutors who weren’t committed to his reforms, and last February, he promulgated a list of new policies with massive, “revolutionary” scope. The office no longer charges sex workers with fewer than three convictions, nor does it prosecute marijuana possession. It no longer starts the plea negotiation process with the highest possible sentencing, a practice that privileges leverage over substantive justice. And he instructed his prosecutors to tally the cost of incarcerating everyone sentenced with a crime and to demonstrate why the expense — upwards of $42,000 a year per person — is justified in a city where the average total family income is $41,000. Although it’s hard to make a difference from inside a prosecutor’s office, Krasner has shown that it can be done from the very top.
Notably, the dramatic reforms he has put in place were informed by his experiences on the defendants’ side of the courtroom, which offers a clearer view of systemic inequities intrinsic to the criminal justice system: clients who languish in jail due to a failure to come up with a few hundred dollars in bail money; undocumented parents who go to trial because taking a plea would mean deportation and separation from their children; exculpatory evidence wrongly withheld, and, all too often, the lack of consequences for the prosecutors who withhold it.
Importantly, if Harris had to be tougher on crime because she is black, it wasn’t for the sake of some higher ideal. It was because her personal ambitions demanded it.
As California’s “top cop,” Harris was no Krasner. While Krasner has made headlines for commanding the full scope of prosecutorial discretion in service of vulnerable communities, Harris most notoriously used her discretion to let Steve Mnuchin, a chief villain of the housing crisis cum secretary of Treasury, off the hook.
[italics added] The last sentence of the quote links here. Other links within the quote are omitted.
That failure of Harris to prosecute [a/k/a exercise of white collar prosecutorial discretion while pursuing truancy] has received widespread merited online attention.
A side note, how would a compare/contrast of Klobuchar and Krasner turn out?