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Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign is touting her as a tough-on-crime prosecutor who "put murderers and abusers behind bars" as part of a $50 million ad blitz in several battleground states.
But that PR effort will have to contend with Harris’s record as San Francisco district attorney, which includes lenient plea deals and probation for a string of career criminals—a serial domestic abuser who later murdered his girlfriend, a repeat felon who gunned down a newspaper editor in Harris’s hometown of Oakland, and others.
Harris's fledgling campaign is leaning on her prosecutorial past—as San Francisco district attorney, then California attorney general—to fend off criticism of her soft-on-crime record. "I took on perpetrators of all kinds—predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain," she said at a campaign rally in Wisconsin last week. "So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type."
But in 2005, Harris struck a plea deal with Dwayne Reed, charged with the murder of the California secretary of state’s son during a robbery. Harris agreed to release Reed, who had six prior felony convictions, in exchange for testifying against his accomplice in the murder-robbery, according to news reports at the time. Reed, who was released from jail two days after testifying against his accomplice, murdered another man eight months later.
In December 2004, Harris’s office agreed to a plea deal with Scott McAlpin, who was charged with domestic violence against a woman, Anastasia Melnitchenko, whom he had stalked and terrorized since 2001, according to SFGATE. Eight months after the plea deal, McAlpin, who had eight other domestic violence charges on his record, murdered Melnitchenko and stuffed her body in his trunk. Prosecutors in Harris’s office did oppose McAlpin’s release from a San Francisco jail days before the murder.
Former San Francisco homicide prosecutor Jim Hammer, who worked under Harris, criticized her for striking plea deals with both Reed and McAlpin, and wrote in a September 2006 column that Harris lacked the "guts and the willingness to go after tough cases."
In 2006, Harris’s office granted probation to Devaughndre Broussard, charged in the brutal assault and robbery of a metro train passenger. A year later, Broussard assassinated Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey, who was investigating a crime syndicate implicating Broussard’s family.
"He should have gone to state prison," the father of Broussard’s previous assault victim said at the time. "Blame it on Kamala Harris."
Harris has not addressed her handling of those cases, and her campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
But she has faced criticism before as being soft on crime, and overly critical of police officers. She embraced the movement to defund police in 2020, saying that activists had "rightly" called to redirect police budgets from officers on the street to social services programs.
During Harris’s tenure as district attorney—from 2004 to 2011—police officers accused her of being too slow to charge murder cases, and offering lenient plea deals in lieu of going to trial.
She even alienated fellow Democrats, including then-Sen. Dianne Feinstein, for quickly rejecting capital murder charges in the April 2004 murder of San Francisco police officer Isaac Espinoza.
A San Francisco homicide investigator blasted Harris over her handling of the murder case of David Taylor, who confessed to beating and stabbing his 65-year-old mother to death in a drug-induced haze. Harris’s office took over the case, and agreed to a voluntary manslaughter charge against Taylor, which carried a 12-year prison sentence.
"This deal was made without any input from me," San Francisco homicide inspector Maureen D’Amico said in 2006.
"It was just picture-perfect investigation when everything was done right, done well," D’Amico said. "If (Taylor) gets out, goes back to crack cocaine, he is liable to flip out. This time it could be an innocent citizen."
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