Re: Crime lab scandal rocked Kamala Harris's term as San Francisco district attorney

[Harris the incompetent]

On 30 Dec 2023, Tranny Trump <patr...@protonmail.com> posted some
news:umqour$1kcc4$2...@dont-email.me:

> The whore was good for one thing, sucking cocks for a government
> paycheck.

SAN FRANCISCO — Kamala D. Harris was this city’s top prosecutor, running
to become California’s elected attorney general, when a scandal stunned
her office and threatened to upend her campaign.

One of Harris’s top deputies had emailed a colleague that a crime lab
technician had become “increasingly UNDEPENDABLE for testimony.” Weeks
later, the technician allegedly took home cocaine from the lab, possibly
tainting evidence and raising concerns about hundreds of cases.

Neither Harris nor the prosecutors working for her had informed defense
attorneys of the problems — despite rules requiring such disclosure.
Harris “failed to disclose information that clearly should have been
disclosed,” Superior Court Judge Anne-Christine Massullo wrote in a
scathing decision in May 2010.

At first, Harris fought back. She blamed the police for failing to inform
defense lawyers. She estimated that only about 20 cases initially would be
affected. And her office accused the judge of bias because Massullo’s
husband was a defense lawyer.

But the turmoil increased. With the local criminal-justice system at risk
of devolving into chaos, Harris took the extraordinary step of dismissing
about 1,000 drug-related cases, including many in which convictions had
been obtained and sentences were being served.

Now this episode, which undercut Harris’s image as a polished leader and
raised questions about her management style, has taken on new relevance as
the senator seeks the Democratic nomination for the presidency. Casting
herself as a “progressive prosecutor” who was concerned for the rights of
defendants, Harris has highlighted her seven-year tenure as San
Francisco’s top law enforcement official as evidence of how she balanced
her roles.

Harris’s opponent in the Democratic primary for attorney general, former
Facebook general counsel Chris Kelly, said at the time that the ruling
showed Harris had “systematically violated defendants’ civil and
constitutional rights” because her office hid “damaging information about
a police drug lab technician and was indifferent to demands that it
account for its failings.” Kelly declined to comment.

A review of the case, based on court records and interviews with key
players, presents a portrait of Harris scrambling to manage a crisis that
her staff saw coming but for which she was unprepared. It also shows how
Harris, after six years as district attorney, had failed to put in place
written guidelines for ensuring that defendants were informed about
potentially tainted evidence and testimony that could lead to unfair
convictions.

Harris, in an interview with The Washington Post, stressed that the crime
lab was run by the police. But she took responsibility for the failings,
including that she had not developed a written policy so that her office
would notify defendants about problems with witnesses and evidence, as
required by law.

“No excuses,” Harris said, sitting in a small, windowless office near the
U.S. Capitol. “The buck stops with me.”

One of the most important players in the case was Jeff Adachi, the city’s
elected public defender, who was at odds with the way Harris handled the
scandal.

“When all that happened, I think she was slow to respond,” Adachi said,
while not blaming Harris directly. Some of the attorneys in Harris’s
office “knew it was a problem and never informed us, the defense, that
there was a problem with this.”

Adachi spoke at his office in an hour-long interview with The Post nine
days before he died on Feb. 22.

Kamala Harris ‘grew up’ with Jeff Adachi. Then tragedy struck.

Adachi and Harris were old friends from the University of California’s
Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. But for much of 2010, the
crime lab scandal pitted them against each other. Harris was elected
district attorney in 2003 and reelected in 2007. As a candidate for
attorney general, she stressed that she had simultaneously pushed
criminal-justice reforms while also being tough on violent crime.

Following state guidelines, her office had pursued thousands of cases
against drug offenders, an unpopular position among many in liberal San
Francisco. Those cases depended on evidence examined by the city’s
understaffed crime lab, whose technicians regularly testified in court
when Harris’s prosecutors went to trial.

Deborah Madden was one of three lab workers. The city’s police department
knew that Madden had been convicted for her role in a 2007 domestic
altercation in which she threw a phone that injured another person. She
was sentenced to 30 days in jail and three years of probation and
prohibited from possessing alcohol or a firearm. She was temporarily
suspended from working at a crime lab.

Separately, Sharon Woo, an assistant district attorney working for Harris,
became concerned that Madden wasn’t showing up to testify in court. That
led her to write the email to Harris’s chief deputy in November 2009 that
said Madden was “UNDEPENDABLE.”

Massullo said in her ruling that when Woo wrote the email, “individuals at
the highest levels of the District Attorney’s Office knew that Madden was
not a dependable witness.” The judge did not name the individuals.

Harris said in the interview that she was not told of the problem at the
time by the police or her top assistants. Shown a copy of the
correspondence during the interview, she said, “I never saw this email . .
. and that was part of my frustration with the process. But I take full
responsibility.” The email was not copied to Harris.

Woo said in an interview that she did not discuss her concerns with Harris
but sent her email to Harris’s top assistant at the time, Russell
Giuntini. He did not return a call seeking comment.

Judge incredulous
A month after Woo’s email, the crisis escalated as Madden’s sister told
authorities that she had discovered a vial of cocaine in Madden’s
apartment. Madden later admitted that “she had taken some cocaine salt
from the lab for personal use,” according to her attorney’s sentencing
memorandum. She pleaded no contest to the state’s cocaine possession
charge, which was removed from her record after she completed a drug-
treatment program, according to her lawyer, Paul DeMeester. Madden
declined to comment.

Finally, in March 2010, the police publicly announced that there might be
problems with evidence from the crime lab. Harris said it was not until
that time that she was told of the problems.

During the three months after Woo’s email, Harris’s office prosecuted
cases that relied on crime lab testing, but defense attorneys were not
told that evidence might have been tainted or that Woo had questioned the
credibility of a key prosecution witness.

With her race for attorney general underway, Harris, then 45, faced
increasing scrutiny about when she knew about the scandal and why
information had been withheld from defense attorneys. Adachi, the public
defender, wrote to Harris, asking when her office first learned about the
possible tainted evidence.

As questions mounted, a group of defendants asked Massullo, the judge, to
dismiss their drug cases.

Woo appeared on behalf of Harris’s office to answer questions about why
the district attorney didn’t inform defense lawyers about potentially
tainted evidence. Under a 1963 U.S. Supreme Court case, Brady v. Maryland,
prosecutors must turn over evidence that could exonerate defendants. A
note attached to the Madden file said “Brady implications.”

Woo testified that the district attorney’s office had no written procedure
outlining how to handle Brady material that should be given to defense
attorneys. Woo said Harris relied on police to inform them that such
exculpatory evidence existed.

The judge was incredulous.

“But it is the district attorney’s office affirmative obligation,”
Massullo said, according to a court transcript. “It’s not the police
department who has the affirmative obligation. It’s the district attorney.
That’s who the courts look to. That’s who the community looks to, to make
sure all of that information constitutionally required is provided to the
defense. . . . What I am gathering from what you are saying is that there
is no formal way for your office —”

Woo interjected: “In terms of a written policy, I don’t think there’s a
written policy.”

Massullo put the blame directly on Harris. In her ruling, she excoriated
the district attorney for having “failed to disclose Madden’s criminal
record, her suspension, and information relating to her ability to perform
her work as a lab criminalist.”

Harris, asked why her office had not developed a written Brady policy
after six years in office, said she had been working on it for two years
but had not completed it due to complications over who had access to
police personnel information.

“I cared a lot about working out a Brady policy. . . . I was saying in my
office, we have to have one. It was a big controversy,” she told The Post.
“We were working on this, and it was much too slow. It took too long.”

Harris bristles
At the office of the public defender, meanwhile, attorneys began an
expensive, months-long process of examining hundreds of cases that might
have involved tainted evidence.

“We held a press conference and publicized the fact that all this
misconduct was occurring, and I immediately said, ‘This is going to result
in dismissal of hundreds of cases,’ ” Adachi said in the interview. “Her
response was something like, ‘Yeah, this might affect a dozen cases.’
Right away, I knew this is much bigger, and you know as it happened, we
got over a thousand cases dismissed.”

Brian Buckelew, who was Harris’s director of legal affairs and public
information, said Harris was “shocked” at the scope of the problem. “There
was recognition that this is just sloppy and could result in something
that is unfair,” he said. “It caught not only San Francisco by surprise
but also counties across California and perhaps across the country.”

As the criticism hurt Harris’s campaign for attorney general, she
bristled at Massullo’s harsh words about her conduct. In June 2010,
Harris’s office called Massullo’s ruling “contrary to law” and blamed the
police for failing to disclose Madden’s conduct.

Then, Harris’s office accused the judge of bias because her husband was a
defense lawyer. That strategy failed when a Monterey County Superior Court
judge ruled in August 2010 that Massullo had no bias in the case.

The scandal escalated further when Adachi questioned whether Harris had
also failed in separate cases to reveal the names of police officers who
had been convicted or found to have committed misconduct. He said at the
time that Harris was acting in an “unethical” fashion and “is putting the
privacy interests of police officers who have misconduct records and who
have been convicted of crimes above the rights of citizens to a fair and
honest trial,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Harris said at the time that Adachi was “playing politics with public
safety.” She said in the Post interview that the police had legitimate
privacy concerns.

Harris won her primary and then faced the Republican nominee, Los Angeles
District Attorney Steve Cooley. He decided not to raise the specifics of
the crime lab issue, while calling her a “radical” who threatened public
safety. Harris declared victory on election night, but the race was so
tight that Cooley did not concede until three weeks later. Cooley declined
to comment.

Harris said the crisis taught her lessons that she carries into her
presidential campaign.

“You cannot run an office without designating folks and giving them
authority,” she said. But she told her deputies after the crime lab
scandal to alert her about serious problems: “Hey, I need to know these
things. It will not be bothering me. . . . My name is on the door. And I
took an oath.”

Some of Harris’s aides raised the possibility that only those cases with a
proven taint should be dismissed, not all of those that might have been
affected. “And I said, ‘No, we have to deal with the fact this now called
into question the integrity of the system,’ ” Harris said. “There has to
be consequences paid for that.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/crime-lab-scandal-rocked-kamala-
harriss-term-as-san-francisco-district-attorney/2019/03/06/825df094-392b-
11e9-a06c-3ec8ed509d15_story.html

So why wasn't the whore disbarred?