Coli TLR Narrative: "Kamala sent innocent Black Men to Prison"....Reality: "Of the 1,900 convictions she presided over, 45 went to actual prison"

[ORDER_66]

My dude. I’m speaking generally. You said that if a law/policy that doesn’t specify that it’s negatively targeting black people disproportionately affects black people negatively, that it’s still targeting black people. I simply asked if the opposite was also true… that a law/policy that disproportionately affected black people positively was also targeting black people (positively)

How is the answer simple for one but not the other?

Man look all we know that it's usually negative with us... it's never positive inverse with these same laws... they make the laws with negative effects in mind for us.

 

[The_Truth]

Truth hurts.

Being a victim hurts more.

 

[The_Truth]

Is that what you got from me speaking on brutality and the corruption of the system? Do you think only the guilty Is affected?

Answer my question and I'll answer yours.

 

[Ozymandeas]

from your own post



It was over 2,000

I know you're upset but you have to read carefully broadie. The article clearly says that in those 2,000 other cases, other prosecutors were leading those cases. Not Kamala. Of the cases that Kamala herself presided over, 45 men were imprisoned.

 

[Insensitive]

Kamala was the AG at that time.
It doesn't matter that she didn't personally do it.

When YOU fukk up at your organization, your middle manager or your director is going to get their
shyt kicked in, it doesn't matter that they didn't "personally fukk up".
They head the organization so they bear the brunt of the responsibility for YOUR decisions.


Either way, the point should be about compliance in malicious systems.
It is a known, established fact that Marijuana's schedule 1 classification was a racist distinction
and done specifically to make it more easy to destroy lives and remove people from the larger American society.

You cannot run on supporting, protecting and loving Black people while participating in an inherently
destructive practice.

 

[Ski Mask]

Answer my question and I'll answer yours.

My question answers yours. If you think I'm trying to defend actual criminals then there's nothing more to talk about.

 

[Ski Mask]

She was dead last in her own state for a reason. You can wave the others as just being misinformed, but how do you explain those from her own state?

 

[Cat piss martini]

these crackas on the Coli
working overtime for cheeto
hitler.

 

[Sk3ptical]

Don't drive with weed in the car or walk around with weed on you. Very simple.

Nikkas acted like she put thousands of black men in prison when in reality, she allowed most to plead out.

And of the cats that went to prison, many had multiple charges but, even now you're still trying to cape for them

She not winning nikka

 

[Insensitive]

Calling people crackers for being critical of the American Justice system and an agent within it
is actually peak cracker shyt.

 

[The_Truth]

My question answers yours. If you think I'm trying to defend actual criminals then there's nothing more to talk about.

Well, if you don't care enough to give a straight answer than I don't care enough to decipher your riddles.

 

[The_Truth]

This thread is the perfect example of what is wrong with both siders. They're extremists. And you can't reason with an extremist.

This thread debunks a popular lie that has been circulated for years about Kamala Harris. And when confronted with the facts (or lack of facts) about this bogus claim, these people just double down on the hate. The narrative went from "Harris locked up thousands of black men for nothing" to "45 people is way too many people to go to prison". These both side ni66as are moving the goal post like it's a ping pong ball. In that respect, they're just as dangerous as the lunatics who vote for republican.

And it's not even about Kamala Harris being the AG, because they would hate anyone who was in that position for simply doing their job. These people don't make the laws. They enforce them. The only way to change the laws you dont like is to...drumroll please...VOTE for the people who will.

 

[Insensitive]

Adding information to the thread:
Kamala Harris Article

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), a leading candidate to be Joe Biden’s running mate, repeatedly and openly defied U.S. Supreme Court orders to reduce overcrowding in California prisons while serving as the state’s attorney general, according to legal documents reviewed by the Prospect. Working in tandem with Gov. Jerry Brown, Harris and her legal team filed motions that were condemned by judges and legal experts as obstructionist, bad-faith, and nonsensical, at one point even suggesting that the Supreme Court lacked the jurisdiction to order a reduction in California’s prison population.

The intransigence of this legal work resulted in the presiding judges in the case giving serious consideration to holding the state in contempt of court. Observers worried that the behavior of Harris’s office had undermined the very ability of federal judges to enforce their legal orders at the state level, pushing the federal court system to the brink of a constitutional crisis. This extreme resistance to a Supreme Court ruling was done to prevent the release of fewer than 5,000 nonviolent offenders, whom multiple courts had cleared as presenting next to no risk of recidivism or threat to public safety.

More from Alexander Sammon

Despite a straightforward directive from the Supreme Court to identify prisoners for release over a two-year period, upholding a 2009 ruling that mandated the same action over the same timeline, the state spent the majority of that period seesawing back and forth between dubious legal filings and flagrant disregard. By early 2013, it became clear that the state had no intention to comply, leading to a series of surprisingly combative exchanges.

While Harris’s ultimately unsuccessful presidential campaign saw questions raised about her criminalization of truancy and her tough-on-crime reputation during her time as San Francisco’s district attorney, her role in California’s prison reduction case largely flew under the radar, though it was decried at the time. As concerns grow about Donald Trump’s subversion of the law—he, along with his attorney general, William Barr, is currently defying a Supreme Court ruling by refusing to restart the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program—the potential Democratic vice-presidential nominee engaging in relatively similar obstinacy is jarring.

Sen. Harris’s office has yet to respond to a set of questions from the Prospect.

HOW DID HARRIS’S office turn a simple court order to release low-risk prisoners to prevent cruel and unusual punishment into a constitutional fiasco?

Federal courts seldom look to prisoner release; it’s a remedy of last resort. But California was a unique case, with its uniquely awful prison system. At its height, it was stuffed to some 200 percent of its designed capacity. There were not enough beds or medical personnel but an extreme excess of bodies. In one prison, 54 prisoners shared a single toilet. Preventable deaths due to substandard and overstretched medical care occurred every five to six days. Suicidal inmates were locked in telephone-booth sized cages for 24 hours at a time.

For nearly two decades, Republican and Democratic administrations essentially ignored the problem, despite constitutional protections for prisoners against cruel and unusual punishment enshrined in the Bill of Rights. Finally, in 2009, a federal district court found that no other plausible solution existed for getting the state to conform to a constitutionally reasonable standard than a forced prisoner release. An earlier pledge, given before Harris’s time, to quickly build new prisons was not seen as credible, especially amid the Great Recession and California’s limited finances. The district court mandated that the state enact a series of decarceration measures to reduce the prison population to 137.5 percent of its design capacity within two years.

The state appealed the district court ruling, and on May 23, 2011, the Supreme Court found in Brown v. Plata that California’s prison system was in violation of its prisoners’ Eighth Amendment rights. Despite its relatively conservative tilt, the Court identified prisoner release as the most effective method for ending the state’s constitutional violation in a timely manner.

The verdict split 5-4, with conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy joining the Court’s liberals. Upholding a lower-court mandate, Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in the case, including an array of gruesome details from inside those prisons, and condemning the state for facilitating “needless suffering and death,” as he called it.

At that point, Kamala Harris had been the state’s attorney general for just over four months, representing California as its top legal officer. But the Supreme Court ruling would have to be enacted on her watch. Every six months, the state would have to show it had decreased its prison population in compliance with a threshold overseen by a three-judge district court panel: 167 percent of capacity by the end of 2011, 155 percent by June 2012, finally arriving at the target level of 137.5 percent by June 2013.

It soon became clear that the state would hold out on complying with the judicial order. 2011 passed with little progress made on the decarceration mandate, and by 2012, a report surfaced that proved the state actually intended to increase its prison population. In May of that year, Harris’s office “confirmed their intent not to comply with the Order but instead to seek its modification from 137.5 percent design capacity to 145 percent,” a modification that was not permitted. The deadline for compliance was eventually extended to the end of 2013.

 

[Insensitive]

By April 2013, just two months from the initial deadline given in that Supreme Court decision, California still had 9,636 prisoners more than the court-imposed ceiling. The state submitted a proposal that involved relocating inmates to fire camps to fight wildfires, and preventing out-of-state prisoners from being returned. But upon review, the three-judge panel found that that still left California’s prisons some 4,170 prisoners over the hard limit.

After a series of back-and-forths, the three-judge panel arrived at a solution: the expansion of “good time” credits for nonviolent offenders, shortening stays often by just a handful of months. Even the state’s own expert witness had testified years prior that he did not oppose good time credit measures, and that there was no correlation between length of stay and recidivism, meaning that the public was not at risk. Other states—Washington, Illinois, even tough-on-crime New York—had implemented these programs with success. The court found good time credits alone would do more than enough to close the gap, and solve the problem for good. Some 5,385 inmates were eligible for release under good time credits.

But Gov. Brown, with Harris as his defense lawyer, did not agree. Harris’s office launched into a campaign of all-out obstruction, refusing to answer why they could not simply release low-risk, nonviolent inmates to conform to the Supreme Court’s request. “Defendants offered no explanation, however, why they could not release low-risk prisoners early,” the June 2013 ruling stated.

But Harris’s office didn’t stop there. Instead, they claimed on behalf of the state that the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction to even request such a release, refusing to answer questions as to how they would implement the Supreme Court ruling, and courting a constitutional crisis. That resulted in a stunningly sharp rebuke from the three-judge district court panel in a June 2013 ruling.

When asked by what date the state could identify their list of prisoners who are unlikely to reoffend, “defendants defiantly refused,” the judges wrote, “and stated, somewhat astonishingly, that our suggestion that we might order defendants to develop a system to identify low-risk prisoners, a system that the Supreme Court had suggested we might consider ordering defendants to develop ‘without delay,’ is a prisoner release order that vastly exceeds the scope of any of the Court’s prior orders.” The Supreme Court, in fact, ruled that the three-judge district court panel had exactly that authority in its 2011 ruling. “In tortured logic,” the district court continued, “defendants suggested that the Supreme Court’s statement ‘did not authorize the early release of prisoners,’ or even the consideration of that question.”

Harris’s attorney general’s office, the ruling added, “continually equivocated regarding the facts and the law,” to the point that the panel strongly considered holding the state in contempt. They rejected that action only because it would have delayed the release of nonviolent inmates even further, and aided the state’s obstructionist campaign. “This Court would therefore be within its rights to issue an order to show cause and institute contempt proceedings immediately,” the ruling reads. “Our first priority, however, is to eliminate the deprivation of constitutional liberties in the California prison system. To do so, we must first ensure a timely reduction in the prison population.”

 

[Insensitive]

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IRFAN KHAN/LOS ANGELES TIMES VIA AP
Kamala Harris, as California attorney general, with Gov. Jerry Brown, attends the funeral service of a Los Angeles County law enforcement officer in October 2016.
Harris, of course, was acting on behalf of the state’s governor, who preceded her as state AG and was notorious for his posture on this issue as well. But she might have chosen not to defy the Supreme Court. Her legal work, in particular, not only drew ire from the court—it also raised eyebrows among observers. “Defiance of the federal court order requiring the reduction of the California prisoner population is reminiscent of the Southern governors of the 1950s declaring their defiance of federal court desegregation orders,” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley Law School, told NPR at the time. “Both were misguided efforts to undermine enforcement of the Constitution.” Added Barry Krisberg, longtime president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, “The legal arguments that the state is putting forward make no sense.”

Meanwhile, The Atlantic was even more unsparing of Harris’s behavior in the case, writing that her “court filings are largely void of dispositive facts and unworthy of a first-year associate, much less the chief lawyer of our nation’s most populous state.” According to writer Andrew Cohen, Harris’s behavior may have even put her in breach of California’s legal and ethical standards, which forbid filing a motion “for an improper purpose, such as to harass or cause unnecessary delay.”

Indeed, that particular behavior is condemned multiple times in the court’s June 2013 ruling: “defendants have repeatedly found new and unexpected ways to frustrate this Court’s orders,” the three-judge panel decried, and “used this Court’s patience and good-faith attempts to achieve a resolution as an excuse for protracting these legal proceedings to a time that could hardly have been imagined.” Harris’s work on that case alone would likely disqualify her from a shot at a federal bench or Supreme Court appointment, Cohen opined.

Harris’s use of the anti-desegregation playbook to prevent the release of low-level offenders ultimately failed. Finally, in 2014, the state acceded, and the prison population was reduced.

This era of Harris’s tenure as attorney general escaped the recent close re-examination of some of the higher-profile cases in her prosecutorial past. During her brief presidential run, a memo from the tail end of this battle resurfaced; in late 2014, lawyers from her office claimed that nonviolent offenders needed to stay incarcerated, lest they lose bodies for fire camps in the wildfire-plagued state, as Jackie Kucinich of the Daily Beast reported.

Harris was quick to disavow the memo, claiming she had no knowledge of it and telling BuzzFeed News she was “shocked” by the argument. But it squares firmly with the sort of arguments her office was putting forward for multiple years preceding it. Harris, meanwhile, was known to run an extremely centralized attorney general’s office, with few things coming in or going out without her express sign-off. With a ruling handed down from the country’s highest court, this was one of the highest-profile cases she managed in her role as attorney general. An extremely high-stakes case involving a decarceration order she spent years resisting is unlikely to have escaped her awareness.