Kamala Harris' tenure as a district attorney is marred by high-profile cases that raise serious questions about her approach to justice. Fifteen years ago, her office prosecuted Jamal Trulove, a man wrongfully convicted of murder based on dubious evidence. Advocates eventually helped exonerate Trulove, but only after he spent several harrowing years in prison. While Harris has since embraced key principles of the Black Lives Matter movement, including the idea of defunding the police, she has yet to adequately address her controversial past as a tough prosecutor, when criminal justice reform wasn't a primary concern for progressive activists.
The Story of Jamal Trulove
Jamal Trulove's story is a stark reminder of the systemic flaws in the criminal justice system. Trulove, a Black man, was convicted of murder largely due to the testimony of a questionable eyewitness and the actions of corrupt cops. Despite these glaring issues, then-District Attorney Kamala Harris pushed forward with the case, seemingly prioritizing her conviction rate over justice.
Key Points:
- Trulove spent years in a maximum-security prison, hundreds of miles from his family.
- He endured violence and near-death experiences, including being stabbed, during his incarceration.
- His wrongful conviction was later overturned, leading to a $13.1 million settlement from San Francisco.
The Impact of Trulove's Conviction
Trulove's wrongful conviction had devastating effects on his life, causing him to lose six years of freedom and endure the emotional trauma of being wrongly identified as the murderer of his friend, Seu Kuka. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors awarded him a $13.1 million settlement, acknowledging that Harris' office concealed exculpatory evidence about the sole eyewitness' credibility and prejudicially smeared Trulove as having assassins ready to kill the witness.
Harris' Silence on Her Past
Despite her recent alignment with criminal justice reform, Harris has yet to publicly address her role in cases like Trulove's. Since becoming the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Harris has faced few, if any, calls from liberals to explain her past actions and reconcile them with her current stances.
“When somebody dies in the hood, everybody feels like they're involved,” Trulove told Vice in a 2019 interview. “When someone gets killed, you can plan on getting jacked up by the police regularly.”
It's hard to believe that he ever envisioned things getting as ugly as they did.
Despite beating the odds by making it out of the city's Sunnydale housing projects and relocating to New York City, Harris' office was ready to pounce upon his return to the Bay Area in 2008 to see his family:
He got into an argument with the kids' grandmother, and police were called, Trulove said. The officers went from almost bored to wide-eyed and agitated after running his ID, reaching for their weapons and shouting at him to get on the ground, he recalled. “I'm like, ‘Oh, man, whatever this is, I'll be out within 72 hours,'” the maximum length of time police can hold someone without charging them with a crime.
But rather than investigate, as an appellate court later found, San Francisco cops tasked with solving Kuka's murder worked to frame Trulove as the killer within hours of the shooting. Though two dozen or more people saw Kuka die, only a single eyewitness agreed to talk to police. And though she failed to pick Trulove out of a series of photos and identified someone else by name, police eventually coerced her into fingering him, including shortly after his VH1 show aired in late 2007.
An arrest warrant was issued the following year when a second person facing third-strike felony charges told police Trulove was the shooter. It was bad luck that he happened to have a run-in with law enforcement soon afterward.
Despite no physical evidence linking him to the crime, Trulove was convicted and sentenced to 50 years to life. “It's the closest thing to dying,” he said. [emphasis added]
Conclusion
As Kamala Harris steps into the national spotlight, the story of Jamal Trulove serves as a poignant reminder of the impact of prosecutorial decisions on individuals' lives. It also highlights the ongoing struggle for fair and balanced reportage, especially as the mainstream media's Kamala honeymoon continues.
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True accounts of the horrors this stupid and evil woman, Kamala Harris, has perpetrated must be made at the forefront of Pres. Trump’s campaign. All of her evil deeds must come to light, over and over again, so that the American public knows exactly what they would be getting if they vote for her: total Marxism, totalitarianism, the dissolution of the Constitution, the imprisonment of all those not in step with her sick version of Amerika: ie the incarceration of so many totally innocent people on made-up charges re Jan. 6th. It is all there in the open to see, but it must be overwhelmingly publicized because 99% of the media is Marxist and are and will continue to cover up and whitewash for her.