Just as the election race began, Kamala Harris went through a hard pit, although this was not made public at the time. She and Maya had to make sure her mother got her rounds of chemotherapy. In an opinion piece published in 2018, Harris related an incident during his mother’s hospitalization, towards the end:
As far as I remember, my mother had always enjoyed watching the news on television and reading the newspaper. When Maya and I were kids, she insisted that we go and watch Walter Cronkite’s show every night before dinner. But suddenly he lost interest. His big brain had decided he couldn’t take it anymore.
Although there was still room for us. I remember he had just applied as attorney general in California and he asked me how I was doing.
“Mommy, those guys say they’re going to kick me,” I said to her.
She rolled over on the bed, looked at me and showed me the biggest smile. I knew how I was raised. I knew his fighting spirit was still alive in me.
On February 11, 2009, the cornerstone of the family, the scientist who studied cancer to find a cure, The woman who raised and shaped two strong and talented women more than anyone else died of cancer in Oakland.
In the months and years that followed, friends saw Harris’s eyes get wet more than once on important occasions when someone mentioned his mother.
District Attorney Harris had used her experience as a lawyer for her campaign. But his job in San Francisco was complicated. When Mayor Villaraigosa stated that he supported his candidacy for attorney general in 2010, he said: “Kamala has spent her entire professional life as a prosecutor in the trenches, raising the conviction rate to the highest level in 15 years. “
Journalist Peter Jamison, writing for SF Weekly at the time, delved into the district attorney’s statistics and noted that the rates presented by Harris were based on sentence reduction agreements reached with defense attorneys. Agreements between the parties are of course an important part of the criminal justice system.
Prosecutors in the San Francisco Hall of Justice had a particularly rough day on February 9, 2010. One jury falsely convicted a man and another, after just one day of deliberation, acquitted three gang members charged with the murder of two rivals, in a process that had taken five months. Harris was not directly involved in any of these cases, but she was responsible for the prosecution.
In the trial that led to the gang members ‘acquittal, defense attorneys found that DNA evidence from one of the murders had been tampered with and that the lead witness’ testimony was inconsistent. One of the defendants had his right hand broken and in a cast, and yet it was said he could have jumped a fence to fleeAnd although he was right-handed, he was accused of being the one who fired. The speed with which the innocent sentences were handed down raised doubts about the prosecutors’ decision to press charges.
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“They should only bring cases that they honestly believe they can prove beyond any reasonable doubt”said attorney Kate Chatfield, who represented one of the three men.
That same day, another jury found Jamal Trulove guilty of shooting his friend Seu Kuka in 2007, in a residential complex in Sunny-dale, south of the city. Trulove wept when the verdict was read (and for good reason, as it turned out). Trulove was an aspiring rapper who had appeared on I love New York 2, a VH1 reality show.
An eyewitness claimed she was 100 percent sure that Trulove had committed the crime. The prosecutor in the case stated that the witness testified despite the risk of reprisals, which endangered her own life, and that she had been moved and received money to cover her expenses. Prosecutor Harris did not prosecute the case, but echoed her subordinate’s words and praised the “Brave witness who decided to show his face.” A judge sentenced Trulove to 50 years in prison.
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Trulove’s sentence would count towards the statistics supporting the claim that criminal convictions had increased under Harris. But years later, the truth emerged.
The lawyer in charge of the appeal was convinced of Trulove’s innocence.
In January 2014, with Harris as Attorney General, a state appeals court overturned Trulove’s conviction, ruling that “The San Francisco district attorney was swept up by prejudice” and that the story of the witness who testified despite fears for her life “It was a montage”
In March 2015, two months after Attorney General Harris announced her candidacy for the United States Senate, a new jury from San Francisco cleared Trulove of all charges. But the matter didn’t end there. Trulove, who had spent eight years behind bars, filed a lawsuit against the police and the city, but not Harris, alleging that agents set him up, and in 2018, a federal jury awarded him $ 14.5 million in compensation.
In March 2019, when Senator Harris was already running for vice president, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors settled the Trulove case with an additional $ 13.1 million in compensation.
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Kamala Harris tried to be progressive. I really appreciate that Said Marc Zilversmit, the attorney who handled Trulove’s appeal. At a time when being progressive in the judicial world was very rare, she put all those positive ideas into practice. And I could have done a lot more ”.
During his promotion to senior positions, Harris has cited many times his experience as a prosecutor and his successes. It has been his great asset. But it’s also a double-edged sword, and Jamal Trulove’s wrongful conviction will always tarnish his reputation as a San Francisco prosecutor.
Harris faced five Democratic rivals in the primaries, all of them men. The more men, the more likely that the only woman in the dispute will succeed. The five men fought for their respective support, and Harris took advantage.
The only woman who could have run was Jackie Speier, a Democratic congressman from Hillsborough, south of San Francisco, who announced in early 2010 that she was considering running. As a young assistant to Congressman Leo Ryan, Speier had accompanied his boss to Guyana in 1978 while investigating Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple sect. Ryan was murdered on that trip, and Speier was injured in a series of horrific events that ended in a mass suicide and the murder of more than nine hundred people. Speier has continued to have shrapnel on his body ever since.
In the California Legislature and Congress, Speier had earned a reputation as a maverick who stood up against excessive banking interests or attacks on consumer privacy. These positions became relevant after the Wall Street crash in 2008, the Great Recession and the subsequent crisis, which hit California hard. But shortly after Speier expressed interest in the position, Harris’ strategists revealed they had already raised $ 2.2 million for the Attorney General campaign, an impressive amount that could hardly be matched by a candidate starting from scratch.Speier chose to stay in Congress.
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Money is crucial in any campaign, especially when it comes to positions that are not at the top of the electoral lists, that arouse far less attention and less interest than that of governor or senator. Harris had no independent source of income and, of course, had not inherited a fortune from his mother.
The rival he was most concerned about was Chris Kelly, a former Facebook lawyer who had enough money to fund himself. Kelly first ran for public office, eventually spending $ 12 million for the June primaries, twice as much as Harris for the entire season.
Harris had certain advantages: She had already held two elections and faced harsh politics in San Francisco, she was known in the Bay Area for being in the news and the Chronicle regularly, and she was the only prosecutor in San Francisco. profession. Of the six candidates for the Democratic Party primaries.
Interestingly, the polls from Harris’s team reflected a change in people’s attitudes. Some voters who passed the strict “three beat” law in 1994 abandoned Pete Wilson’s lock and jail philosophy and opened up to an alternative. After setting out her philosophy of alternative pathways, education, drug treatment and rehabilitation in her book Smart on Crime, Harris portrayed herself as a prosecutor for criminal justice reform.
“People saw the prison system as a revolving door that was not used to re-educate inmates,” said Ace Smith. It was perhaps the first major election in which someone raised the idea of criminal justice reform. ‘
Harris got a big boost in October 2009 when Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, a reformist chap, expressed his support. He was the best-known cop in Cooley’s home country, and he had considerable support from a law enforcement officer, who confirmed his credentials as a guardian of order.
But the good news was accompanied by tragedy.
Lili Smith, the smart girl with Apert syndrome who had helped pack and hand out flyers during Harris’ first campaign at the district attorney’s office, had turned fifteen, the age when looks and adaptation to the group became things , very important. In the Marin County universities she attended, the other kids didn’t bully her.
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They just ignored him, and he isolated himself more and more. She and her parents, Ace Smith and Laura Talmus, decided to attend boarding school, Scattergood Friends School in West Branch, in rural Iowa. There she started to adapt and bond, and got very good grades.
He read the autobiography of Cherie Blair, the wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, after reading that of Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers agricultural union. On October 9, he called his mother and left her a message saying they would talk in the morning. That night he suffered a stroke and died.
Harris was taking a break from the campaign when he received a call from one of Smith’s teammates, Dan Newman, who informed him of Lili’s passing. Ace Smith and Laura Talmus were an important part of the Harris campaign’s organizational structure.
But they were also good friends. Harris took the first flight to San Francisco to join Lili’s parents in their grief.
There is nothing worse than the loss of a child. But Talmus and Smith turned their pain into a good thing by starting a charity., Beyond Differences, which develops academic programs for schools across the country to combat social isolation. They also learned about Harris’s affection for them. In the years since Lili’s death, he has called them on their birthdays and Mother’s Day, and has helped raise money on behalf of Lili for the Beyond Differences cause.
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