Kamala Harris' call for reform collides with her past
1 / 5U.S. Senator Kamala D. Harris, D-California, addresses supporters while holding a campaign rally at Morehouse College on Sunday, March 24, 2019, in Atlanta. The Democratic candidate for president is at least the fifth presidential candidate to visit Georgia in the 2020 cycle.
Now a presidential candidate , Harris is casting herself as a progressive who consistently leveraged her power in the justice system to further civil rights causes and advocate for the disadvantaged. She has pledged a wholesale overhaul of the country's fractured criminal justice system, arguing for marijuana legalization, bail reform and a moratorium on the death penalty.
"Everyone who has experienced the criminal justice system knows it's broken," said Lateefah Simon, a civil rights activist who worked for Harris in San Francisco."She would say, 'we're confined by the rules of the law, and in the areas where we have discretion, we are going to work to try to move justice.'"
The program has since become a source of tension with criminal justice advocates, who see it as sign of Harris' outdated approach to dealing with problems that stem from poverty. Harris' approach at the time was considered smart politics for a politician seeking to run statewide. Throughout her career, Harris worked to win over powerful police unions. She refused to support a bill requiring her office to investigate shootings involving law enforcement officers. In 2015, she declined to back statewide standards for body cameras, arguing that individual departments should decide how to use the technology.
But Harris's public tone changed as speculation grew about her running for president in 2020. Last year, Harris endorsed Democratic Sen. Cory Booker's bill for federal legalization of marijuana. She argued on Twitter that"making marijuana legal at the federal level is the smart thing to do and it's the right thing to do." She released a video declaring that"marijuana laws are not applied and enforced in the same way for all people.
Harris appears to have shifted her stance 10 months later. In December of 2016, Harris filed a motion in a case challenging the application of California's money bail laws saying the system is deserving"of intense scrutiny." She pledged not to defend any bail scheme that fails to take into account a defendant's ability to pay. Three weeks later she was sworn in to the Senate.
"I'm glad she's come to the right position now, but it's too late for tens of thousands of Californians, real human beings who have been detained in jail every day in California throughout the whole state, that the attorney general could have stopped," said Phil Telfeyan, one of the plaintiff's attorneys in the bail cases.
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