A LOOK AT THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM HISTORY OF CA DISTRICT ATTORNEY (AND US SENATE HOPEFUL) KAMALA HARRIS
When Kamala Harris was elected California’s Attorney General in 2010, her past achievements as San Francisco’s District Attorney, and the ideas in her 2009 book, Smart on Crime, led many to believe she would use her position as top prosecutor to make “bold” steps toward reforming the state’s criminal justice system.
But critics say Harris—who is favored to win outgoing US Senator Barbara Boxer’s seat—as Attorney General hasn’t stepped far enough outside of her comfort zone to make the hoped-for changes to California’s justice system.
In an effort to increase law enforcement transparency and accountability, Harris has implemented use-of-force training procedures, police body-worn camera policies, and an open data website that includes city, county, and state crime and arrest rates, deaths during arrest, deaths in custody, and the number of law enforcement officers killed or assaulted. As Attorney General, Harris also launched Back On Track LA, which built on her earlier San Francisco program, connecting inmates with wraparound services including therapy, education, employment training, and other programs to help participants while they’re behind bars and once they return to their communities.
Harris has disappointed civil rights activists by opposing efforts to have special prosecutors, rather than local district attorneys, investigate when cops shoot civilians.
And on both sides of the reform debate, both reform advocates and law enforcement officials have criticized Harris for not picking a side in the debate over Prop. 47, the 2014 voter-approved law that reduced certain non-serious felonies to misdemeanors.
The Sacramento Bee’s Christopher Cadelago has more on the issue. Here are some clips:
“Once she became attorney general, I didn’t see the transition from those initiatives: her writings and her overall philosophy,” said Earl Ofari Hutchinson, president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable. Harris, he said, could have been “a more vigorous advocate for full criminal justice reform.”
“She’s been confined to (her) comfort zone and unwilling to be big and bold.”
Harris’ reluctance to use the state’s top law enforcement office as a megaphone to advance her earlier work has disappointed allies in the fight, some of whom question whether she’s strategically avoided topics that put her at loggerheads with the law enforcement community she worked hard to bring around since taking office.
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“To look at where the dialogue was in the country before, and where it has gone on criminal justice reform, in many ways it is catching up to what she has been saying since before it was even popular,” said Lenore Anderson, executive director of Californians for Safety and Justice.
Last year, Harris initiated a web-based public portal showing years of arrest and crime rates, and deaths in custody, among other data sets, by department.
She helped develop statewide policies regulating the use of body-worn cameras, saying she favors the technology, and new training on racial profiling, implicit bias and procedural justice, also known as officer communication, which advocates say builds trust, noted Anderson, Harris’ chief of policy when she was district attorney.
“I think it would be impossible for anyone to conclude that the attorney general has been shy about what she thinks on criminal justice,” Anderson said. “This has been a major theme of her tenure as an elected official, both local and statewide.”
Harris touts her career as a prosecutor as preparation for the U.S. Senate, an office she said she’ll use to speak up for society’s voiceless, reduce sentences for nonviolent drug offenders and take questions about criminal backgrounds off job applications. In California, she’s worked to prevent sexual assault, eliminate the rape kit backlog in state labs, fight cyberexploitation and protect sensitive immigrant communities.
Harris said there’s an extensive amount she’s done in cases in which she didn’t invite the media, or politicians, into the room.
“In order for a lot of this stuff to work, law enforcement has to understand the viability and appropriateness so that they will actively participate and cooperate,” she said.
“True, I haven’t been engaged in a lot of grandstanding,” Harris added. “I haven’t sought a lot of publicity on it. But the work has happened. These are things that did not occur before.”
CALIFORNIA SUPREME COURT TO INCREASE TRANSPARENCY BY TELEVISING ORAL ARGUMENTS
Starting today, The California Supreme Court will provide a live webcast of oral arguments with English and Spanish subtitles, in a move by Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye to increase public access to the state’s court system.
“The court’s decision to live-stream its regular oral argument sessions is a logical progression for its outreach efforts—using technology to open the courtroom doors to students, practitioners, and the public throughout the state and the nation,” said Frank McGuire, Court Administrator and Clerk of the Supreme Court of California. “It promises to create a greater understanding of the integral role of the court in our constitutional democracy, deciding matters of statewide importance and maintaining uniformity in the law.“
In addition to the webcast, the high court’s website will include a document that identifies the justices, attorneys, the cases and issues before the court, and the cases’ dockets and briefs.
AND SPEAKING OF SUPREME COURTS…THE US SUPREME COURT TURNED DOWN A CHALLENGE TO DEATH PENALTY IN CALIFORNIA
The US Supreme Court Justices rejected a challenge to California’s death penalty system and its decades-long delays as a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
The rejected appeal was brought by Richard Boyer, an Orange County man sentenced to die 32 years ago after murdering an elderly couple. Boyer says the years spent waiting to die were psychologically damaging.
Lone dissenter Justice Stephen Breyer said capital punishment in California suffers from “serious unreliability, arbitrariness in application, and unconscionably long delays that undermine the death penalty’s penological purpose.” Breyer also pointed out that California’s death row inmates more often die from suicide than execution.
While Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined Justice Breyer in a previous 46-page dissent calling on the court to consider whether the death penalty is constitutional, surprisingly, Ginsburg did not sign Breyer’s two-page dissent, which was a condensed version of his earlier opinion.
The New York Times’ Adam Liptak has more on the issue. Here’s a clip:
The case was brought by Richard D. Boyer, who has cited the stress of his long wait on death row after being sentenced in 1984 for the murders of an elderly couple in Fullerton, Calif. Referring to the conclusions of a state commission in 2008, Justice Breyer said the delays in Mr. Boyer’s case were the product of a dysfunctional system.
“More California death row inmates had committed suicide than had been executed by the state,” he wrote. “Indeed, only a small, apparently random set of death row inmates had been executed. A vast and growing majority remained incarcerated, like Boyer, on death row under a threat of execution for ever longer periods of time.”
Justice Breyer has emerged as the court’s leading critic of the death penalty. In a sweeping 46-page dissent last June, he urged the court to take a fresh look at the constitutionality of the death penalty.
“It is highly likely that the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment,” he wrote, referring to the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishments. Justice Breyer said that death row exonerations were frequent, that evidence showed innocent people had been executed, that death sentences were imposed arbitrarily, and that the capital justice system was warped by racial discrimination and politics.