The Truths We Hold

by Kamala Harris

  At the end of my summer internship, I was thrilled to accept a position as deputy district attorney. All I had to do was finish my final year of law school and take the bar exam, and then I’d be able to start my career in the courtroom.

  I finished law school in the spring of 1989 and took the bar exam in July. In the waning weeks of summer, my future seemed so bright and so clear. The countdown to the life I imagined had begun.

  And then, with a jolt, I was stopped in my tracks. In November, the state bar sent letters out to those who had taken the exam, and, to my utter devastation, I had failed. I couldn’t get my head around it. It was almost too much to bear. My mother had always told me, “Don’t do anything half-assed,” and I had always taken that to heart. I was a hard worker. A perfectionist. Someone who didn’t take things for granted. But there I was, letter in hand, realizing that in studying for the bar, I had put forward the most half-assed performance of my life.

  * * *

  • • •

  Fortunately, I still had a job in the district attorney’s office. They were going to keep me on, with clerk duties, and give me space to study to retake the exam in February. I was grateful for that, but it was hard to go into the office, feeling inadequate and incompetent. Just about everyone else who had been hired along with me had passed, and they were going to move on with their training without me. I remember walking by someone’s office and hearing them say to someone else, “But she’s so smart. How could she have not passed?” I felt miserable and embarrassed. I wondered if people thought I was a fraud. But I held my head up and kept going to work every day—and I passed on my second attempt. I was so proud and so honored the day I was sworn in as an officer of the court, and I showed up at the courthouse ready to start the work. But as it turns out, neither law school nor the bar exam really teach you what to do in court, and in those early days, it can feel like you’ve landed on another planet, where everyone speaks the language but you. As a clerk, you can represent the people in court under supervision. But this was the first time I’d be in trial on my own.

  I had prepared, going over the facts of the case a dozen times. I’d practiced the questions I wanted to ask; internalized the precise wording of my legal motions. I’d researched and rehearsed every practice and custom—down to the skirt suit that was de rigueur for female attorneys, back before women were permitted to wear pants in the courtroom. I’d done everything I could. Still, the stakes were so high, it never felt like enough.

  I walked into the courtroom, down the gallery aisle, and past the pews to the bar that separates defendants, families, witnesses, and other spectators from officials of the court. Chairs were arrayed in front of the bar for lawyers waiting for their cases to be called, and I took my seat among them. Nerves, excitement, and adrenaline jockeyed for position in my mind. But most of all, I was honored by and conscious of the immense responsibility I held—the duty to protect those who were among the most vulnerable and voiceless members of our society. When my turn came, I rose from my chair at the prosecutor’s desk and stepped up to the podium, saying the words every prosecutor speaks:

  “Kamala Harris, for the people.”

  The reason we have public offices of prosecution in America is that, in our country, a crime against any of us is considered a crime against all of us. Almost by definition, our criminal justice system involves matters in which the powerful have harmed the less powerful, and we do not expect the weaker party to secure justice alone; we make it a collective endeavor. That’s why prosecutors don’t represent the victim; they represent “the people”—society at large.

  I kept that principle front and center as I worked with victims, whose dignity and safety were always paramount for me. It takes an enormous amount of courage for someone to share their story and endure cross-examination, knowing their credibility and most personal details may be on the line. But when they take the stand, they are doing so for the benefit of all of us—so that there will be consequences and accountability for those who violate the law.

  “For the people” was my compass—and there was nothing I took more seriously than the power I now possessed. As an individual prosecutor, I had the discretion to decide whether to bring charges against someone and, if so, what and how many charges to bring. I could negotiate plea agreements, and provide sentencing and bail recommendations to the court. I was just starting out as a prosecutor, and yet I had the power to deprive a person of their liberty with the swipe of my pen.

  When it came time for closing arguments, I approached the jury box. I decided to do it without notes so I wouldn’t be looking down at a piece of paper, reading off my best arguments for why they should convict the defendant. I wanted to look the jurors in the eye. I felt that I should know my case well enough that I could close my eyes and see the entire incident in 360 degrees.

  As I finished my closing and headed back to the prosecutor’s table, I caught a glimpse of the audience. Amy Resner, my friend from the first day of orientation, was sitting there with a big smile on her face, cheering me on. Now we were both on our way.

  The daily work was intense. At any given time, an individual prosecutor might be juggling more than one hundred cases. We started with lower-level work: arguing preliminary hearings, doing misdemeanor trials that covered things like DUIs and petty thefts. As the years passed, I got more and more trials under my belt and moved my way up the hierarchy of the office. In time, I would start prosecuting violent felonies, which took the work to a whole new level.

  I would pore over police reports and interview witnesses. I would sit with the coroner and go through autopsy photographs, always cognizant that I was looking at somebody’s child or parent. When police arrested a suspect, I would go down to the police station and stand on the other side of a two-way mirror and pass notes back and forth with investigators conducting the interview.

  Once I started prosecuting felonies, I was assigned to homicide duty. I’d be given a briefcase on a Friday afternoon containing a pager (high-tech for the early nineties), a pen and pad, a copy of the penal code, and a list of critical numbers to call. For the next week, whenever the pager went off, it meant there had been a homicide and I was needed at the scene. Usually, that meant leaping out of bed between midnight and 6 a.m. My role was to make sure evidence was collected in the proper way, with all appropriate constitutional protections intact, so that it would be admissible in court. I often had to explain to victims and their families that there was a difference between what we knew happened and what we could prove happened. There is a giant chasm between arrest and conviction, and if you want to get from one to the other, you need legally obtained evidence.

  I was at home in the courtroom. I understood its rhythm. I was comfortable with its idiosyncrasies. Eventually, I moved into a unit that focused on prosecuting sex crimes—putting rapists and child molesters behind bars. It was difficult, distressing, and deeply important work. I met so many girls, and sometimes boys, who had been abused, assaulted, neglected, all too often by people in relationships of trust.

  What made these cases especially difficult was what was often needed to get a conviction: having the assault survivor testify. I spent a lot of those days meeting with survivors at Oakland’s Highland General Hospital, walking them through what it would mean to take the stand, what that experience would be like. For some survivors, it was simply unimaginable to get on the witness stand and speak publicly about something they didn’t even want to speak about privately. There is so much pain and anguish associated with having experienced sexual violence. Containing that kind of emotional trauma to take the stand requires an extraordinary amount of courage and fortitude, especially when your abuser is also in the courtroom, when that abuser may be a family member or friend, and knowing you will be cross-examined by defense counsel whose job it is to convince the jury that you aren’t telling the truth. I never faulted those who couldn’t bring themselves to go through wi
th it.

  Often, as in the cases of the youngest children, the challenge of getting a conviction came down to the ability to testify, as much as the willingness. Those were the cases that haunted me most. I’ll never forget a tiny, quiet six-year-old girl who was being molested by her sixteen-year-old brother. It was my job to sit with that sweet little child and see if I could get her to tell me her story—and whether she would be able to tell it again in front of a jury. I spent a lot of time with her, playing with toys, playing games, trying to build a relationship of trust. But as much as I tried, I knew—I just knew—that there was no way she could articulate to a jury what she had suffered. I remember walking out of the room and into a bathroom, where I broke down and cried. I wasn’t going to have enough evidence to charge her brother. Without her testimony, I’d never be able to prove the allegations beyond a reasonable doubt. Despite all that prosecutorial power, I’m not sure I’ve ever felt quite so powerless.

  These were just some of the challenges of defending children from sexual predators. There was also the jury itself, which sometimes seemed more inclined to believe adults than children. This was especially the case when it came to sexually exploited youth. I often think of a case I had involving a fourteen-year-old who had run away from her foster home with a group of young men from her neighborhood. Instead of being her allies and protectors, they’d taken her to an empty apartment and gang-raped her. I could tell that she had learned at a young age that she couldn’t trust adults; she wore an attitude of skepticism and hostility like a suit of armor. I felt for that poor girl, and the horrific childhood that had led her to this moment. But I was also acutely aware of how the jury might perceive her as she entered the courtroom, chewing gum, potentially coming off as almost contemptuous of the process.

  I worried: Would they see her as the child she was, as an innocent victim of serial abuse? Or would they simply write her off as someone dressed “inappropriately,” who had it coming?

  Jurors are human beings, with human responses and reactions. I knew I had to meet them where they were if I was to have any chance of moving them to a more just interpretation of the facts.

  I could see they weren’t responding to her well. They didn’t seem to like her. “The penal code was not created to protect some of us,” I reminded the jury. “It is for all of us. This girl is a child. She needs to be protected from predators who are going to pounce. And one of the reasons the defendants picked her as their victim is that they thought you wouldn’t care about her enough to believe her.” In the end, we got a conviction, but I’m not sure the verdict meant much to the girl. She vanished after the trial. I asked some investigators to help me try to find her, but, though we had gotten a sketchy report that she was being trafficked on the streets of San Francisco, we could never confirm it. I never saw her again.

  It was hard not to feel the weight of the systemic problems we were up against. Putting this young girl’s abusers in prison meant they wouldn’t be able to hurt other children. But what about the one they had already gotten their hands on? How had our system helped her? A conviction was never going to make her whole, nor was it enough to get her out of the cycle of violence in which she was trapped. That reality, and what to do about it, bounced back and forth in my head—sometimes in the back of my mind, sometimes at the front of my skull. But it would be a few years before I could tackle it head-on.

  In 1998, after nine years in the Alameda County District Attorney’s office, I was recruited across the bay to the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office. I was hired to run the career criminal unit, which focused on violent and serial offenders. I was hesitant to go at first, and not just because I loved working in the Alameda County courthouse. At the time, the San Francisco DA’s office had a dubious reputation.

  I was concerned by stories of dysfunction in the office. At the same time, it was a promotion: I would be running a unit, overseeing a team of prosecutors. This was a chance to grow. Plus, my friend and mentor Dick Iglehart, who was then the chief assistant district attorney, was actively encouraging me to come. With some trepidation, I accepted the offer—and soon found that my concerns had been warranted.

  The office was a mess. Just one computer for every two lawyers, no filing system, and no database to track cases. It was rumored that when attorneys were finished with a case, some would toss the files in the trash. This was the late 1990s, and yet the office still didn’t have email.

  There was also a huge backlog of cases that were languishing, uninvestigated, unprosecuted. Lawyers were frustrated with the police for not investigating cases. Police were frustrated with the district attorney because his office was failing to get convictions. The decisions being made at the top appeared to be arbitrary and random, and staff morale was close to rock bottom. That toxic environment was made even worse by a series of firings. One Friday, fourteen lawyers came back from lunch to find pink slips on their chairs. It was devastating. People cried and yelled, and soon their fear turned into paranoia. Lawyers were afraid of one another—afraid of backstabbing by colleagues trying to protect their own jobs. Some people started skipping out on the goodbye parties of their fired compatriots, worried that their attendance would mark them as targets for firing, too.

  It was incredibly frustrating, and not just in terms of the day-to-day work. I believed the district attorney was undercutting the whole idea of what a progressive prosecutor could be. My vision of a progressive prosecutor was someone who used the power of the office with a sense of fairness, perspective, and experience, someone who was clear about the need to hold serious criminals accountable and who understood that the best way to create safe communities was to prevent crime in the first place. To do those things effectively, you also need to run a professional operation.

  After eighteen months, I got a lifeline. The San Francisco city attorney, Louise Renne, called me with a job offer. Louise was the first woman to hold that office. She was a groundbreaker, and she was fearless, taking on entrenched interests ranging from gun manufacturers and tobacco companies to male-only clubs. There was an opening to lead the division in her office that handled child and family services; she wanted to know if I’d be interested. I told her I would take the job but that I didn’t just want to be a lawyer dealing with individual cases; I wanted to work on policy that could improve the system as a whole. Too often, young people in foster care migrated to juvenile detention and then into the adult criminal system. I wanted to work on policies that would stem that devastating flow.

  Louise was all for it.

  I spent two years at the city attorney’s office. I started by co-founding a task force to study the issues of sexually exploited youth. We put together a group of experts, survivors, and community members to help guide the work—a series of recommendations we would present to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

  Norma Hotaling was my partner in that effort. She had firsthand experience with the challenges we were tackling. She had been abused as a girl, and ended up homeless and addicted to heroin. She was arrested for prostitution more than thirty times. But hers was one of the few such stories that have a happy ending. Norma got clean. She went to college. She got a degree in health education. And as soon as she graduated, she put that degree to use, creating a program designed to rescue women from prostitution that is widely replicated today. I couldn’t think of a better person to have teamed up with, and I admire her for having the courage to tell her story and put it to use for the benefit of so many others.

  One of our priorities was creating a safe place for prostituted youth to get love and support and treatment. I knew from years of experience that the survivors we were trying to help usually had nowhere to go. In most cases, their parents weren’t in the picture. Many of them had run away from foster care. People often wondered why it was that exploited kids picked up by the police would go right back to the pimps or older prostitutes who “took care of them.” It didn’t seem so s
trange to me—where else were these kids able to turn?

  Our task force proposed establishing a safe house for sexually exploited youth—a sanctuary that would offer substance abuse and mental health treatment; the resources needed to get back to school; and a network of support to keep vulnerable young people safe, healthy, and on track. We advocated for funding to create the safe house, as well as to run a public education campaign. We put posters up in public bathrooms and on buses, where at-risk youth would be able to get the information they needed without their pimp hovering over them.

  We also believed it was important to disrupt the network of brothels masquerading as massage parlors, where so many people were being sexually exploited, so we asked the board of supervisors to direct law enforcement to investigate them as one of their top priorities.

  To our delight, the board of supervisors adopted and funded our recommendations. We were able to rescue scores of runaways within the first couple of years. Law enforcement, meanwhile, shut down nearly three dozen brothels in the city.

  The work was meaningful, empowering, and proof that I could do serious policy work without being a legislator. It also boosted my confidence that when I saw problems, I could be the one to help devise the solutions. All those times my mother had pressed me—“Well, what did you do?”—suddenly made a lot more sense. I realized I didn’t have to wait for someone else to take the lead; I could start making things happen on my own.