A former prisoner, who was wrongfully convicted during Vice President Kamala Harris’s time as a California prosecutor, is speaking out against what he describes as her troubling pattern of incarcerating innocent men while advancing her political career. Jamal Trulove was sentenced to 50 years in prison for the 2007 shooting death of his friend Seu Kuka. Harris, then the District Attorney for San Francisco, was overseeing the prosecution at the time.
Six years later, Trulove was exonerated on appeal and awarded a $13.1 million settlement from the state of California. Despite this, Harris continued to promote her tough-on-crime stance while campaigning for state Attorney General in the 2010 midterm elections. In a recent interview, Trulove claimed that Harris even “laughed” at his suffering during that time.
“We locked eyes this one time, and she laughed,” he said, the Daily Mail reported. “She literally just, like, kind of busted out laughing. Almost as if she was pointing like, ‘ha-ha’, she didn’t point, but that’s how it felt.” The young man added that he will be voting for former President Donald Trump in November. “If you’re wondering if I’ll be voting for Kamala ‘Laugh-and-Lie’ Harris, f*** no.”
Trulove was falsely accused by police after Seu Kuka was found dead in Oakland in 2007. Officers Maureen D’Amico and Michael Johnson were later found to have fabricated evidence, withheld exculpatory material from Trulove’s defense, and coerced a witness into misidentifying him as the shooter. Trulove was sentenced in 2010 and spent years in maximum-security prisons in Southern California, far from his family, until 2014, when a state appeals court granted him a new trial. His story was featured in the 2019 documentary The Last Black Man in San Francisco.
After his release, the former inmate took to Instagram to express that he still suffers from PTSD as a result of his incarceration. He firmly blames Harris for using his life as a stepping stone to the U.S. Senate. “There’s nothing I could do to make up for that time I missed,” he wrote, NPR previously reported. “No amount of money could ever reverse the time I missed with my kids and the effect that it’s had on [their] upbringing and our relationship.” He briefly pursued careers in acting and hip-hop while suing the state of California over his wrongful conviction. A settlement of $13.1 million was reached in exchange for prosecutors dropping the chance to try him a third time.
Trulove said he found it appalling that Harris would treat black men from the projects like him as if they were pawns on a political chessboard. “People in the projects knew who she was because she was a black district attorney and we thought we had a black district attorney in office that was from Oakland,” he said. “We would think that she would be a little more favorable to us.”
While many of Harris’s allies are downplaying her tenure as a prosecutor, some liberal critics argue that her record warrants thorough scrutiny. Law professor Lara Bazelon, who previously led the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent in Los Angeles, has labeled Harris’s actions as “regressive” regarding prisoner rehabilitation.
“Most troubling, Ms. Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors,” Bazelon wrote in the New York Times.
After joining the Senate in 2018, Harris embraced more progressive stances on incarceration, rebranding herself as a national advocate for liberal policies. She supported legislation to eliminate cash bail nationwide, a shift from her earlier position as District Attorney, where she criticized state judges for making it “easier” for criminals to reoffend.
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