Tag Archives: Kamala Harris

The Right Kind Of Prosecutor

During my years as a practicing lawyer, I came in contact with several impressive Black lawyers with degrees from prestigious schools. Almost all of them were–like me–practitioners of civil or corporate law, usually with one of the larger law firms. The Blacks I knew who did practice criminal law were all defense lawyers. And it goes without saying (so I’ll say it), during those years, they all encountered considerable discrimination. 

So what made Kamala Harris decide to be a prosecutor? I think that early decision sheds considerable light on her judgement, her capacity to analyze the legal landscape and determine how best to seek justice.

The politics of criminal justice have inured most of us to a lopsided view of a prosecutor’s role. In communities large and small, lawyers have for years run for the office on promises to bring “law and order,” to be “tough on crime” and to “put the bad guys away.” We do want to put bad guys away, but we also want to be sure that the guys we’re putting away are really the bad guys. And even a cursory attention to the news confirms that–in too many places–innocent people have been imprisoned or worse. (Also in too many places, those errors have been the result of prosecutorial misconduct.)

It’s important that a prosecutor be concerned with justice–not simply with a win/loss ratio.

What triggered this observation was a recent article in the Indianapolis Star about the exoneration of a man who’d spent 15 years behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit. The case against Anthony Bedolla had unraveled amid allegations of potential police misconduct and constitutional violations.

A re-examination of Bedolla’s murder conviction raised serious concerns about whether detectives arrested the wrong man, then failed to disclose evidence that someone else may have been the killer. Instead, they relied largely on the testimony of a compromised and unreliable eyewitness, according to Bedolla’s petition for post-conviction relief.

Last week, a Marion County judge granted the petition and dismissed the charges against Bedolla, who had been sentenced to 45 years in prison for the killing.

The lawyers who obtained Bedolla’s release worked for the Notre Dame Exoneration Justice Clinic and the Conviction Integrity Unit of the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office. I have been aware of the existence of that Unit, which was created by Marion County Prosecutor Ryan Mears. to “identify, remedy and prevent wrongful convictions” because my youngest granddaughter has interned with the Unit since her senior year in high school. (She’s now entering her junior year in college.) She will also be participating in the opening and operation of the Indiana affiliate of the national Innocence Project.

As Mirror Indy has reported, the establishment of that affiliate is something of a homecoming for its director, Fran Watson, and “will build on her decades-long career as the director of IU McKinney law school’s Wrongful Conviction Clinic, which was a founding member of the Innocence Network.” As she explained to the Mirror, while innocence work exposes the reality of  wrongful convictions, and the various reasons for them, it was really the science of DNA that made exonerations possible.

Without DNA, no one would ever believe public defender people like me who said they’re innocent. Then DNA comes along, and the math is the math, and the numbers are the numbers, and they don’t lie, you have the wrong man in prison, and you lied to put them there.

My granddaughter was present when Anthony Bedolla was released. She’s passionate about justice, and–at least at this point–intending to go to law school. (And yes, I am one proud grandma.) But the reason I mention her participation is that without it, I would not have had the opportunity to interact with Ryan Mears, who–like Kamala Harris–became a prosecutor for the right reasons.

It was Mears who established the “Integrity Unit” in the Marion County Prosecutors office. Mears is one of an emerging generation of prosecutors who understand that the justice system has two equally important tasks: to put away the people who pose a danger to public safety, and to ensure that the people being incarcerated are, indeed, the people who deserve that punishment– that the real “bad guy” isn’t still free to harm others.

Public respect for the criminal justice system requires attention to both tasks.

Marion County is fortunate to have someone in that office who understands the importance of both of those obligations. And if Kamala Harris becomes President, we will be incredibly fortunate to have a Chief Executive who understood the importance of systemic justice at a time when far fewer of us did.

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Which End Is The Deep End?

What does it mean to call a political figure “conservative” or “liberal” today? Our political communication has been (accurately) described as a “fire hose” of propaganda and misinformation, and in that chaos, the original meaning of much terminology has been lost. MAGA Trumpers are anything but conservative. (Just ask some of the genuinely conservative “Never Trumpers,” who will explain the significant differences between conservative beliefs and fascism.)

Liberalism used to mean embrace of the political positions first articulated in the Enlightenment–beginning with what has been called the libertarian principle requiring government to respect the rights of individuals–among them, the rights to speak freely, worship or not as they choose, and go about their business without official interference unless government has probable cause to think a (legitimate) law has been violated. Over time, it came to include issues of fundamental social fairness.

Efforts to denigrate the “liberal” label may have begun earlier, but they really gained steam when the late, un-lamented Rush Limbaugh used it as a term of opprobrium, along with his own constructs like “feminazi.”

The debasement of language has certainly had an effect on America’s political discourse. These days, terms like liberal and conservative are more often used as insults than efforts to communicate a point of view. But a column detailing a recent exchange on CNN with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz points to a possible way out of the linguistic morass. Walz responded to what was intended as an attack on his “liberalism” by putting new meat on the bone of that phrase.

Told that he’d been labeled “too liberal,” Walz responded

What a monster. Kids are eating and having full bellies, so they can go learn, and women are making their own health-care decisions. And we’re a top five business state, and we also rank in the top three of happiness.

Look, they’re going to label whatever they’re going to label. He’s going to roll it out, mispronounce names to try and make the case. The fact of the matter is, where you see the policies that Vice President Harris was a part of making, Democratic governors across the country executed those policies, and quality of life is higher, the economies are better, all of those things.

Educational attainment is better. So, yes, my kids are going to eat here, and you’re going to have a chance to go to college, and you’re going to have an opportunity to live where we’re working on reducing carbon emissions. Oh, and, by the way, you’re going to have personal incomes that are higher, and you’re going to have health insurance.
So, if that’s where they want to label me, I’m more than happy to take the label.

Walz took the opportunity to redefine liberalism as the delivery of things Americans want. As the linked article notes, at least 75 percent of Americans favor: green energy subsidies for the cost of equipment to produce clean energy; requiring police officers to intervene when another officer is using excessive force; establishment of a national database or registry of police misconduct; responding to 911 calls related to mental health issues with mental health professionals rather than police officers; taxing capital gains at the same rate as ordinary income for those making more than $1 million; adopting a 4 percent surtax on income above $5 million; adopting a 1 percent surtax on corporate income above $100 million; and making wages over $400,000 subject to the payroll tax; keeping the Affordable Care Act; allowing Americans over the age of 55 to purchase Medicare; increasing SNAP benefits; expanding the earned income tax credit and raising the minimum wage.

That same 75% also agree that DACA recipients deserve full legal status and a path to citizenship, that visas for skilled workers should be increased, and that the U.S. should hire more personnel to speed up processing asylum claims. They also want to reaffirm our commitment to NATO.

Sizable majorities also want to protect abortion and gay rights, and ban assault weapons.

The liberalism of Walz and Kamala Harris are reflections of that widespread public consensus–not, as MAGA Republicans assert, evidence that liberals have gone “off the deep end.”

Today’s liberals continue to support the “libertarian principle” that individual rights and civil liberties must be protected from government interference. But they also recognize government’s important role in providing an economic and physical infrastructure within which individuals can flourish. Government’s role has always been to prevent the strong from preying on the weak (the problem with that “state of nature” Hobbes wrote about). That role extends beyond protecting citizens’ physical safety–it includes guarding against misuses of economic power and includes measures to mitigate economic hardship.

If that’s the “deep end,” I plan to swim in it.

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Ladies And Gentlemen, I Give You Today’s GOP

Yesterday, Joe Biden announced that Kamala Harris would be his running mate.

Harris is a walking, talking embodiment of the America that so terrifies white nationalists: an Indian mother, a Jamaican father, a Jewish husband. She’s also a whip-smart lawyer and a seasoned public servant. Harris is one of a new generation of highly accomplished, very diverse Democrats–and by “diverse” I don’t simply mean that their ranks include many men and women of color; they are also ideologically, religiously and geographically diverse.

Then there are the Republicans.

Yesterday also saw primary elections in a number of states. In one of those, in Georgia, a white loony-toons conspiracy theorist handily  won the GOP nod for Congress. (In all fairness, it was a female loony-toons conspiracy theorist, so maybe that’s progress.)

Conspiracy theorists won a major victory on Tuesday as a Republican supporter of the convoluted pro-Trump movement QAnon triumphed in her House primary runoff election in Georgia, all but ensuring that she will represent a deep-red district in Congress.

The ascension of Marjorie Taylor Greene, who embraces a conspiracy theory that the F.B.I. has labeled a potential domestic terrorism threat, came as six states held primary and runoff elections on Tuesday.

Greene has also made a series of videos in which she complains of an “Islamic invasion,”  claims Black and Hispanic men are held back by “gangs and dealing drugs,” and pushes an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. After her win was announced, Trump gave her his “full-thoated support.”

The Brookings Institution , as well as the FBI, has confirmed that (despite Trump’s rants about “antifa” and Black Lives Matter) members of white supremacist organizations and adherents of widespread conspiracy theories like QAnon (largely embraced by white nationalists) are responsible for most of the terrorist attacks in the U.S.

In the last four years, violence linked to white supremacy has eclipsed jihadi violence as the predominant form of terrorism in the United States. Beyond high-profile terrorist attacks in the United States like the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue and 2019 El Paso Walmart shootings, white supremacists have also tried to seize on the protests following George Floyd’s death to foment chaos.

In the Georgia GOP primary, Ms. Greene defeated a neurosurgeon described as “no less conservative or pro-Trump.” She held a lead of nearly 15 percentage points early Wednesday.

The New York Times story, linked above, reported that Greene’s victory “is likely to unsettle mainstream Republicans.”  But there really aren’t many–if any– “mainstream” Republicans left, a reality that seemed to escape the authors of the report (and continues to escape most of the Times political reporters).

The reality–especially painful for those of us who spent years working for a very different Republican Party–is that Donald Trump is not an anomaly, and today’s GOP is no longer a political party connected to a set of governing principles and policies. Today, to be a member of what is now the GOP cult is to adopt a tribal identity –an identity characterized by white grievance and a furious rejection of scientific, demographic and moral reality.

Not to mention sanity.

QAnon is a wild, unfounded belief that Donald Trump, of all people, is waging a secret war against elite Satan-worshipping pedophiles in government, business and the media–a war that will lead to a day of reckoning on which prominent people like Hillary Clinton will be arrested and executed. A troubling percentage of today’s GOP base believes it.

I keep thinking back to that great–and prescient– speech from the 1995 movie An American President, when Michael Douglas, playing the President, thunders

We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you, Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things, and two things only: making you afraid of it, and telling you who’s to blame for it. 

Today’s Republican Party has become a cult composed of lightly-tethered-to-reality know-nothings who have uncritically and enthusiastically embraced the party’s only consistent, remaining message:  “You should fear ‘those people’ –the ones who don’t look or worship like real (i.e.white Christian) Americans. They are to blame for all of your problems and disappointments.” 

And so it goes….

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