Harris Has Virtually Disavowed Her Career as a Prosecutor

When Kamala Harris was first introduced on the national stage, she was frequently heralded as a former prosecutor. After she was selected for the ticket in 2020, Democrats and the media quickly worked to rebrand the role of prosecutor due to the fact that the profession was being vilified amid the George Floyd killing in the spring of 2020. Despite the New Yorker’s feeble attempt to rebrand her former profession, others were quick to criticize. Now, Vice President Harris’ former job is infrequently — if at all — mentioned with her bio. 

And it isn’t any surprise. The popularity of prosecution has plummeted in recent years. Scholars may speculate as to underlying cause, but the effect in liberal politics is clear — a long, celebrated career of seeking incarceration is no longer politically popular on the left. 

But now that President Joe Biden has announced his intention to drop out of the 2024 campaign, and thrust his support behind Harris, questions about Harris’ early career and close ties to prosecution may return to the forefront of America’s collective psyche. 

Harris graduated from Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1986. Harris immediately matriculated to the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, where she graduated in 1989. A little known or discussed fact is that Harris failed the bar exam the first time she took it in 1989. She passed the bar in 1990 (and now is apparently an inactive member of the California bar). 

Beginning in 1990, Harris served as a “deputy district attorney” in Alameda County, California, where she remained for four years. She left to fill an appointment from California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, her boyfriend at the time, to serve on the California Medical Assistance Commission, making $72,000 annually ($148,033 in today’s dollars). 

Harris took a brief leave of absence from the District Attorney’s Office to pursue the aforementioned Board Service before returning to prosecution, but this time in a leadership role. In 1998, the San Francisco District Attorney appointed Harris as the head of the “career criminal division.” According to an article written at the time, the division handled some of the office’s “most serious” offenses, including “third strike” offenders.

To jog your memory, “three strike” laws, supported by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, would impose a mandatory life sentence for a person’s third felony conviction. In the intervening 30 years, “three strike” laws have been largely viewed as being a primary contributor to America’s incarceration problem. More relevantly, however, Stanford Law School has led the charge to systematically overturn and repeal any sentence as a result of a “third strike.” Their effort has been deemed a “voice for the forsaken” and a “proven path to clearing out overcrowded prisons.” It was also supported by the Obama White House.

Today, one would be hard-pressed to find a prosecutor who believed a person should receive a life sentence for any third felony conviction. 

In 2004, Harris challenged her former boss for the position of San Francisco district attorney. In her victory speech, Harris vowed that criminals would be “met with the most severe consequences” and promised to work to “build a better relationship” with police. 

Harris served as the district attorney of San Francisco until 2011, at which point she was sworn in as the attorney general of California. Her statewide record is too lengthy to cover in detail here, and changed entirely to suit the California electorate. She quickly went from actually caring about reducing violent crime to devoting significant time and resources to truancy, shifting with the political winds.

While politicians and people should certainly be provided license to change their mind, Harris has completed a full transformation from the start of her career. Virtually everything she publicly supported she has subsequently decried. She has gone from leading the unit that sentenced people to life in prison for a third felony conviction (which would have included drugs such as crack cocaine), to advocating for “ending mass incarceration.”

It’s one thing to reverse track on a single tweet sent out a decade ago. It’s another to completely work to undo decades of public service. 

Maggie Cleary Kilgore is a visiting fellow at Independent Women’s Law Center (iwlc.org) and Deputy Commonwealth Attorney in Culpeper County, Virginia. She is former Special Counsel to Attorney General Jason Miyares and former Deputy Secretary of Public Safety and Homeland Security under the Youngkin administration. She is also a former federal prosecutor.

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