During Wednesday night’s Democratic presidential debate, Tulsi Gabbard tore into Kamala Harris for her track record as a prosecutor in San Francisco and later as California’s Attorney General. The attack was sharp and effective, earning Gabbard an outsize share of the post-debate commentary. Its thrust was entirely fair, too, as any number of articles have demonstrated, including Lara Bazelon’s recent takedown in The New York Times titled Kamala Haris Was Not a Progressive Prosecutor.
The real significance of Gabbard’s critique, however, lies not in the proposition that Harris was a particularly unprofessional or malign prosecutor, but rather in the fact that she seems to have been a rather ordinary prosecutor who simply did her job the way most prosecutors do. And if that makes a former-prosecutor-turned-presidential-candidate look like a monster, then perhaps that says more about prosecutors in general than it does about Kamala Harris in particular.
Gabbard’s gut-punch underscores the difficult position that modern prosecutors find themselves in as the key players in a substantially immoral and increasingly indefensible criminal justice system. A near-universal blind spot of career prosecutors like Harris is their failure to appreciate the fact that law and morality can—and in our system frequently do—diverge.
Is it hypocritical for a person who has used marijuana to prosecute someone for possessing or selling it? Plainly yes, as Gabbard suggested in calling out Harris for doing precisely that. But enforcing bogus laws is not just hypocritical, it can be immoral as well. Consider the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a federal law that, among other things, required citizens of free states to assist in the capture and return of escaped slaves. Or eugenics laws adopted by more than half the states during the 20th century that subjected tens of thousands of law-abiding citizens, mostly young women, to forced sterilization and a childless future. Then there’s Shreveport, Louisiana’s ordinance making it a crime to wear saggy pants. Some 726 men, 96 percent of them black, were arrested under that law between its adoption in 2007 and its repeal in June of this year, after a Shreveport officer shot and killed 31-year-old Anthony Childs while trying to arrest him for wearing pants that didn’t come up to his waist. All of those laws were immoral, and participating in their enforcement constitutes a manifestly immoral act.
Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/kamalas-conundrum
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