Chuck Ross of the Washington Free Beacon explores Kamala Harris’ record as a prosecutor.
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 sot-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.
