As district attorney of San Francisco, Kamala Harris let a dangerous rapist with a history of prior acts of violence out of prison after just two years. She did this by letting him enter into a plea deal that concealed his prior criminal history (such as his “prior convictions for domestic violence“), crimes that should have led to him receiving a much longer prison sentence. The Daily Mail reports on this in the news story, “How Kamala Harris allowed ‘an illegal migrant rapist’ to be released from prison after just two years.” It notes that “a horrific rape case brokered by” Kamala Harris’s office
while she was district attorney…calls into question her commitment to protecting women. In 2008, Lillian Gradillas was sitting in a party bus late at night…The driver, Gustavo Rosales, attacked Gradillas multiple times on the bus before forcibly raping her, despite her attempt to fight off his advances…At the time, Rosales was ‘illegally in the United States, convicted of assaulting his spouse, evading his child support obligations and unqualified to operate a bus’…[Devastated by the rape, Gradillas] lost her job, suffered lower grades in school, and was heavily medicated while she struggled to hold her family together.
Rosales struck a plea deal with attorneys reporting to Kamala Harris and pleaded guilty to the crime. As a result, Rosales was sentenced to just three years in prison….Sources told DailyMail.com that Rosales should have been sentenced to at least seven years in prison even in a plea deal, and could have easily been sent away to prison longer [based on having a prior domestic violence conviction].
‘It’s stunningly remarkable,’ a lawyer familiar with the case said to DailyMail.com. ‘It’s so low.’ ‘This guy got the lowest possible sentence he could have for committing a rape and I don’t see how you justify that with his previous criminal conviction as well as his being in the country unlawfully,’ he said. The case and plea deal was filed and agreed to by assistant district attorney Adrian Ivancevich. Typically, an assistant district attorney would be given assigned guidelines for plea deals, Essayli said, but anything out of normal would require Harris to personally approve it.
After campaigning on a pledge to be a “progressive” prosecutor, Harris relied mostly on plea deals when she was the District Attorney of San Francisco, to hide her low conviction rate. She brought only the easiest cases to trial, yet still managed to lose many of them. The San Francisco Weekly reported in 2010 Harris had won only 55 percent of murder trials since the beginning of 2009, and that in the first quarter of 2010 her office’s conviction rate for all felony trials was only 53 percent.
Kamala Harris was very bad as the district attorney of San Francisco. Due to her policies, some murderers were never punished at all, while other killers spent only a short time in prison, even as harmless pot users ended up being prosecuted.
“When Kamala Harris became the DA after violating the campaign finance limits to out-raise and outspend her former boss, who did obey the limits, she immediately sent out mass ‘let’s make a deal’ letters to every defense lawyer with a pending murder case. These cases were almost all pled out to manslaughter or even lesser charges, and then Harris claimed these as convictions on murder cases for her closure rate. This is unheard of and set a tone of defense lawyers not taking her office seriously,” explains San Francisco lawyer Harmeet Dhillon.
“Kamala Harris’ incompetence got two gang violence witnesses killed, by housing them just across county lines. The bad guys found and killed them, the cases then fell apart. And scared witnesses then refused to testify against more bad guys,” Dhillon recounts. As a result, murderers ended up roaming free rather than being prosecuted.
“The Harris DA office’s ‘lack of conviction’ was a widely known joke in CA law enforcement circles. And everyone — especially the criminals — knew and exploited it,” Dhillon notes. “Kamala Harris manipulated the stats as DA by charging only” the easiest-to-prosecute “cases that were ‘trial ready’ in the first place — an absurd metric as most cases are built up after charging on a probable cause basis. Even so, her conviction rate was a joke,” Dhillon adds.
Her office’s felony trial conviction rate was much lower than in Republican-controlled Orange County. Even though the San Francisco district attorney’s office only brought cases to trial where the defendant’s guilt was pretty obvious.
Kamala Harris employed people as prosecutors who did no work (and thus let criminals escape justice), as long as those people donated to her campaign. “While Harris was the DA in San Francisco, the supervisor in one of the criminal units was a no-show who literally phoned it in from San Diego, filling out fake time sheets from there where his boyfriend was. This went on for years, only ending under George Gascon’s tenure.”
“Another prosecutor in Kamala Harris’ DA office told” Dhillon “that the office, as policy, did not allege prior crime ‘strikes’ in indictments as is routinely done in other counties such as the one where the deputy DA had come from. This DDA was criticized for alleging strikes; only supervisors were allowed to authorize this and it was rarely done, yet another way Harris went soft on crime.”
“What does it mean when you don’t allege strikes?” Dhillon explains that “it means that a career criminal, a violent criminal, who commits multiple crimes gets two years instead of 25 to life. The prosecutor complained about this internally but it went nowhere.”
California law mandates longer sentences for repeat offenders, in Proposition 8 — which applies to repeat offenders who commit murder, rape, and robbery — and also in California’s Three Strikes Law. Prior crimes are known as “strikes.”
Harris flouted those laws, in refusing to allege prior strikes — as was required by state law. That was an example of Harris’s contempt for the rule of law, and her ideological hostility to anti-crime policies designed to protect victims of violent crimes. So while incompetence and laziness explain some of Harris’s soft-on-crime policies, other of Harris’s soft-on-crime policies are explained by ideological hostility, not mere incompetence or laziness.
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