A former prisoner who was wrongfully convicted during Vice President Kamala Harris’s stint as a California prosecutor is speaking out against what he says was her villainous trend of locking up innocent men while she climbed the political ladder to higher office.
Jamal Trulove was sentenced to 50 years in prison for the 2007 shooting death of his friend Seu Kuka. At the time, he was being prosecuted by Harris, the then-state District Attorney for San Francisco. Six years later, Trulove was vindicated on appeal and awarded a $13.1 million settlement against the state of California, but that didn’t stop Harris from leaning into her tough-on-crime appeal as she sought the position of state Attorney General during the 2010 midterm elections. In fact, she “laughed” at Trulove’s misery, he admitted in a recent interview.
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“We locked eyes this one time, and she laughed,” he said, the Daily Mail reported. “She literally just, like, kind of busted out laughing. Almost as if she was pointing like, ‘ha-ha’, she didn’t point, but that’s how it felt.” The young man added that he will be voting for former President Donald Trump in November. “If you’re wondering if I’ll be voting for Kamala ‘Laugh-and-Lie’ Harris, f*** no.”
Trulove was framed by police after Kuka was found dead one night in Oakland in 2007. Officers Maureen D’Amico and Michael Johnson were discovered to have fabricated evidence, hid exculpatory material from Trolove’s defense team, and intimidated a witness into misidentifying Trulove as the shooter. He was sentenced in 2010 and served time in maximum security prisons in southern California, hundreds of miles away from his family, until 2014 when a state appeals court granted him a chance for a new trial. His ordeal was the subject of the 2019 documentary “The Last Black Man in San Francisco.”
Writing on Instagram after his release, the former inmate said he still experiences PTSD from his incarceration and blames Harris for using his life as a stepping stone on her way to the U.S. Senate. “There’s nothing I could do to make up for that time I missed,” he wrote, NPR previously reported. “No amount of money could ever reverse the time I missed with my kids and the affect that it’s had on [their] up bringing and our relationship.” He briefly pursued careers in acting and hip-hop while suing the state of California over his wrongful conviction. A settlement of $13.1 million was reached in exchange for prosecutors dropping the chance to try him a third time.
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Trulove said he found it abysmal that Harris would treat Black men from the projects like him as if they were pawns on a political chessboard. “People in the projects knew who she was because she was a black district attorney and we thought we had a black district attorney in office that was from Oakland,” he said. “We would think that she would be a little more favorable to us.”
While most allies of Harris are whitewashing her time as a prosecutor, some liberal critics say the presidential nominee’s record deserves a full public hearing. Law professor Lara Bazelon, who formerly directed the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent in Los Angeles, called her actions “regressive” to prisoner rehabilitation.
“Most troubling, Ms. Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors,” Bazelon wrote in the New York Times.
After making it to the Senate in 2018, Harris advocated for more liberal policies on incarceration as she refashioned herself into a progressive on the national stage. She promoted bills that would eliminate cash bail nationally, a reversal from her time as DA when she rebuked state judges for making it “cheaper” for criminals to commit crimes. “During her career in law enforcement, Kamala Harris was a pragmatic prosecutor who successfully took on predators, fraudsters and cheaters like Donald Trump,” spokesman James Singer said of her record.
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