Kamala ' s Conundrum

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 f air, too, as any number of articles have demonstrated, including Lara Bazelon’s recent takedown inThe New York Times titledKamala 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-pre sidential-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 Gabbards suggested incalling o...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs