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3 months ago
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Vice President Kamala Harris took a gamble when playing up her record as a prosecutor at the start of her campaign as the Democrats' all-but certain 2024 presidential candidate this week.
At a rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she compared her Republican rival, former president and convicted felon Donald Trump, to the 'predators,' 'fraudsters,' and 'cheaters' she used to lock up.
But bragging about her time as San Francisco's district attorney and then California's attorney general may not help Harris, who aspires to be the first woman, first African American and first Asian American US President.
The 59-year-old faces criticism from left and right — progressives blame her for more prosecutions of black Californians under her watch, while those on the right paint her as a lefty activist in a powerful role.
Trump's campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt slammed Harris as 'dangerously liberal' and said she 'needs to answer for her own terrible weak-on-crime record in California' from the 1990s to the 2010s.
Kamala Harris, then San Francisco district attorney, speaks to a relative of a slain cop
Kamala Harris, then San Francisco district attorney, and the city's then-mayor Gavin Newsom, and others walk in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Freedom March in 2004
America First Legal (AFL), a conservative legal action group led by former Trump administration officials, this week launched a volley of public records requests about Harris' time as a top lawyer in the Golden State.
The group's vice president Dan Epstein said he would 'aggressively probe' everything from Harris' failure to enforce California's immigration laws to her alleged refusal to disclose conflicts of interest.
'Each step up the ladder of her career appears marked by improprieties or scandal,' Epstein said.
DailyMail.com looks back at some of Kamala's most controversial decisions from those decades…
MERCY FOR COP KILLER
Harris in 2003 became the first woman elected as San Francisco's top prosecutor after campaigning in part on a pledge not to seek the death penalty.
Her stance was tested almost immediately, when police officer Isaac Espinoza was brutally slain in 2004.
Black gang member David Hill gunned him down with an AK-47 during a routine traffic stop.
Despite pressure from several California Democrats, including the state's two US Senators, to bring the death penalty against Hill, Harris held firm and secured a sentence of life without parole.
Even Gavin Newsom, then San Francisco's mayor, said the murder 'rattled' his opposition to state executions.
The cop's widow Renata Espinoza told CNN in 2019 that Harris did not call her before announcing in a press conference she would not seek the death penalty.
'She had just taken justice from us, from Isaac,' Renata Espinoza said.
David Hill gunned him down an officer with an AK-47 during a routine traffic stop.
San Francisco Police Officer Isaac Espinoza, 29, was killed on duty in one of the city's most troubled neighborhood
Officer Espinoza's widow Renata Espinoza said Kamala Harris did not call her before announcing in a press conference she would not seek the death penalty.
MS-13 KILLER SPARED
Edwin Ramos, an illegal migrant from El Salvador and member of the ultra-violent MS-13 gang, committed a triple murder in 2008 in San Francisco when Harris was district attorney.
Ramos' gruesome killings of three members of the Bologna family — Tony Bologna, 48, and his sons Michael, 20, and Matthew, 16 — in a drive-by shooting rocked national headlines.
The family members were returning home from a picnic when Ramos opened fire, apparently mistaking them for gang rivals.
Harris did not seek the death penalty against Ramos, keeping a campaign promise, despite pleas from the bereaved mom and widow Danielle Bologna.
'It was senseless,' she told the San Francisco Chronicle at the time.
She said she was 'extremely angry' that the city 'didn't do anything' and urged officials to 'take responsibility.'
'And to think they didn't deport him back, knowing that he did not have papers and he was here illegally, it is a big issue,' Danielle Bologna added.
Ramos already had a record from before the triple shooting.
He'd reportedly been arrested several times as a youth over a gang attack on a bus passenger and an attempted robbery of a pregnant woman.
But he slipped through the net then because of a city policy not to question the immigration status of juveniles.
Edwin Ramos, the man who shot and killed a father and his two sons in a mistaken gang shooting in 2008, was spared the death penalty thanks in part to Harris
San Francisco district attorney Kamala Harris poses for a portrait in San Francisco, June 18, 2004.
Kamala Harris said taxpayers should finance the sex-change procedure so convicted killer Rodney James Quine could become Shiloh Heavenly Quine
SEX CHANGE FOR KILLER
When Harris was California's attorney general in 2014, she controversially agreed to a settlement that saw a transgender murderer receive a sex-change procedure on the taxpayer dime.
Rodney James Quine and an accomplice kidnapped fatally shot 33-year-old Shahid Ali Baig, a dad of three, in downtown Los Angeles in 1980.
They stole $80 and his car during a drug- and alcohol-fueled rampage.
Quine in 2009 started living as a woman after being locked up with men for 36 years, and sued the state for the 'cruel and unusual punishment' of being forced to retain the genitals he was born with.
Baig's daughter, Farida, tried unsuccessfully in court to block Quine's surgery.
She objected to inmates getting taxpayer-funded surgery that is not readily available to non-criminals.
'My dad begged for his life,' she said.
'It just made me dizzy and sick. I'm helping pay for his surgery; I live in California. It's kind of like a slap in the face.'
Harris did not agree, and backed the settlement, setting the ball rolling on California's permissive approach to transgender detainees.
Dozens of biological male convicts now serve out their sentences in women's prisons, raising the chances of rape and pregnancy among detainees.
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