Vice President Kamala Harris has a history of inflating her record as California’s district attorney to advance her political career.
Harris is basing her campaign argument on her experience as a prosecutor and promises the American people that she will hold former President Donald Trump accountable.
“I was an elected attorney general and an elected district attorney. And before that, I was a prosecutor,” Harris said in her campaign speech on the trail.
‘In those roles I’ve taken on all kinds of perpetrators… So listen to me when I say: I know the type of Donald Trump.’
But a new analysis of her resume as a prosecutor in liberal California casts doubt on some of her most touted claims.
Kamala Harris has artificially inflated her political record on several occasions
As San Francisco’s district attorney, Harris made a splashy appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2005, promoting her as a rising politician to watch with voters.
“With a 90 percent conviction rate, superstar District Attorney Kamala Harris made history when she was elected California’s first African-American female district attorney,” said Oprah Winfrey boasted.
That staggering statistic looked good on Harris’ resume, but it wasn’t entirely true.
The “90 percent conviction rate” Harris bragged about was merely the result of her office. file in murder cases, not in all criminal cases, a detail Harris and her team failed to correct.
One of the reasons Harris’s conviction rate for murder was so high was her decision to dismiss many cases or make deals with criminals on lesser charges.
According to disgruntled detectives, their cases were being dismissed by Harris at an alarming rate.
They also complained about the many settlements Harris secured with the help of public defenders.
At the time, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote reported an unusual case of a man who confessed to murdering his mother while on crack cocaine, beating her with a hammer and then stabbing her with scissors.
Under Harris, prosecutors struck a deal with the defense after his attorney argued the man had a history of mental illness.
He was allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter in exchange for a much shorter 12-year prison sentence than he would have received if convicted in court.
Some San Francisco police officers even took the unusual step of referring gang-related murder cases directly to federal prosecutors.
This way, a federal grand jury could file criminal charges and ensure that their hard-working cases would be thoroughly prosecuted.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, this happened at least seven times in murder cases Harris worked.
Despite her efforts to inflate the conviction count, Harris’s record as a prosecutor looked alarmingly bad as she prepared her campaign for California attorney general.
San Francisco weekly reported in 2010 that Harris had won only 55 percent of her murder cases since the beginning of 2009, and that in the first quarter of 2010 her office’s conviction rate for all felony cases was only 53 percent. Her record paled in comparison to the state average for prosecutors, which was 83 percent.
San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris poses for a portrait
Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at the Democratic National Convention
Harris is no stranger to inflating her resume to make a good impression for her political campaigns.
In 2003, when she was running for San Francisco District Attorney, Harris sent out political letters saying that as a criminal prosecutor she had tried “hundreds” of serious and violent crimes.
That turned out not to be true, as Harris admitted during a debate with her campaign opponents that she had only handled “about 50 cases,” according to debate audio. uncovered by ABC News on Thursday.
Harris’ campaign made clear that Harris was “involved” in the prosecution of hundreds of crimes.
Her campaign spokesman James Singer told ABC News: “For more than a decade, she prosecuted child sexual abuse cases, murders and robberies in Alameda before heading the criminal division and serving as chief of families and children at the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office.”