Three months after becoming San Francisco's chief prosecutor in 2004, Kamala Harris faced a daunting decision: whether to seek the death penalty for a gang member who fatally shot police officer Isaac Espinoza with an assault-style rifle. She could pursue capital punishment for anyone who killed a cop. Or she could stand by her campaign promise never to seek the death penalty. She chose the latter option, winning a life-without-parole sentence for the killing and earning the lasting enmity of law enforcement in California. The police officers’ union in San Francisco holds it against her to this day. The Espinoza case typified the line that many modern prosecutors must walk, and which Harris continued to face when she became California attorney general six years later: Keep doing things the way they’ve always been done, or blaze a new path informed by modern experience with race, incarceration and fairness.
Some Harris supporters say she was a “progressive prosecutor” before the term was in vogue, launching programs designed to help first-time offenders and keep kids in school while dialing back drug possession cases. She took other steps that baffled her liberal backers, particularly as attorney general, when she defended the death penalty, fought to uphold wrongful convictions despite prosecutorial misconduct, and defied a Supreme Court order to reduce overcrowding in California’s prisons. Harris has made her law enforcement experience key to her presidential campaign, telling audiences that she has prosecuted predators and fraudsters, so she is prepared to take on Donald Trump, reminding voters of his felony convictions and history of alleged sexual assault and other wrongdoing, all of which he has denied. Republicans have tried to paint Harris as soft on crime, while some left-wing Democrats pigeonhole her as not forward-thinking enough. Each critique has helped shape her political identity. Neither fully encapsulates her 14 years as an elected law enforcement official, according to people who have known her and observed her at work. “I think the big picture is that she was moderate and pragmatic,” said David Sklansky, a law professor at Stanford University and co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center. “For her whole career, she tried to steer a course that was nonpartisan and nonideological. She rejected the dichotomy of ‘tough on crime’ versus ‘soft on crime.’”
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