Lawyer Josh Dubin Reviews Kamala Harris' Criminal Justice Record

Josh, you were talking about Kamala Harris, and I think this might be a good time to talk about this because she might be the vice presidential nominee. What specifically did she do where there was someone who was innocent or someone who was wrongfully convicted? Let me give a caveat. Okay. The caveat is that I know I'll catch shit from some people that say you have to do everything you can to make sure that Trump is not elected. I will say that even she's an improvement as vice president if he does pick her. Anything's an improvement in my mind. With that caveat, it would take this podcast and four more to go through. She fiercely fought wrongful convictions and was shamed by judges when she was district attorney in San Francisco. What was the case? The Gage case? George Gage. The George Gage case where her prosecutors hid evidence and they tried to protect. Once she knew that there was evidence that was withheld from defense attorneys, once she should have known, in my opinion, that people were innocent, she tried to protect those convictions. Why? Because she wanted to continue winning. She blocked DNA. She went to great lengths to try to block access to DNA for people that were accused of or convicted of felonies. Think about it. We're talking about a $12 DNA test to see if the biological material from a crime that has been preserved is actually the defendants, right? She blocked access to that. I mean, literally- How do you block access to something like that? It seems like that should be a right. Yeah, it seems like it should be a right, but in a lot of states, there's legislation that says you cannot get access to it. The rationale behind it is that it will open up a floodgate of criminal defendants asking for the biological evidence in their case to be tested. I mean, can you- Oh, that's the last thing we would want is more innocent people being freed. What was her justification for this? When she's asked for her justification of it, it's always been on a debate stage and she'll always default to, I stand by my record as a prosecutor and she's never had an explanation that I have ever seen. I don't know, Jason. There was, Jason and I were talking about this before we came on today because there was a New York Times piece by, her name's escaping me. Lara Basilan. Lara Basilan, which if any of your listeners want to listen to her, she goes into exhaustive detail about specific cases and things that Kamala Harris did. The sad part about it, yeah, that's it right there. New York Times, Kamala Harris was not a progressive prosecutor. She was often on the wrong side of history. What is that, the highlight, the marijuana one that you just- She stood by criminalizing marijuana in this state. Now, listen, what we can hope is that she's certainly been saying all the right things lately. I don't know what to believe, to be honest. Well, it's because she wants to be the president. Well, okay, fair enough. I mean, I like to believe that people can evolve and I hope that her viewpoints have evolved. Now she supports legalization, I believe, but the fact is it's impossible to ignore. I hope Biden picks someone else personally, but we'll see. Biden ain't picking anything. They're doing it for him at this point. Well, I'll support him no matter who he picks. If he picks her, so be it, because I believe we're in an existential crisis and we need to- Look, look at this. This is crazy. She could have demanded DNA testing in Cooper's case. Now, Kevin Cooper is on death row. You think about this. If they had denied DNA testing in Clemente's case, he would have been either dead or still on death row. What are we talking about here? We're talking about a test. She has constantly, in case after case, issue after issue, and look, the people that she hurts the most are people of color in this country because they make up- Disproportionate number of people in jail. Yeah, disproportionate. So it's kind of- Well, the truant children thing made me fucking sick. She went after the parents of truant children and threatened them with jail time. Imagine you're a single mom. You're just doing your best to put food on the table. You have to work two jobs and your kids are understandably fucking up and not going to school because there's no father around. You know how devastating this is? Think about it this way because I can only think about it in real life examples. This is how there's enough of a shit show and a fight to get out. Even at- Look, I have a client in New York who is like- and these people become family to us. He's adopted one of the exonerees as his daughter now. John Restivo was convicted of raping and murdering someone with two of his friends, two people that worked for him. He is framed by a cop. They take a hair from the victim and they plant it in his moving truck. Oh, Jesus Christ. The way that they found out that it was planted is that when your hair- You're going to love this, right? When hair is attached to the human head, when you die, there's a physiological phenomenon that happens called post-mortem root banding where a band goes around the root of your hair. It happens after you've been dead the minimum four hours. Prosecution's theory is that he picks up this girl, 16-year-old girl walking home from the roller skating rink with his two buddies, throws her in a van. They rape her, kill her, and dump her near a cemetery and it all happens in 45 minutes. The way that they finally find out that he was framed is it's a moving truck. They search his moving truck and they find hundreds of hairs because we all shed hair. They find one hair from the victim and it's pristine. It's the only pristine hair in the truck. No kinks on it, no dirt, no debris, and there's a post-mortem root band around it. Oh, God. They had to have taken it from the autopsy. After four hours. After four hours. We ended up finding out that the cop had access to the envelopes where the autopsy was. In any event, John Restivo back to the DNA, the perpetrator ejaculated and they had a lot of semen, a lot of biological material DNA. He fought for years to get access to the DNA, finally gets access to it. They test the DNA and he's excluded and his two co-defendants are excluded. What the prosecutor does is they say, okay, well, there must have been a fourth perpetrator. They start testing and this is a process that took years. They start five years. They start testing every single known male associate of John Restivo, Dennis Halstead and John Cogut and it's only after that that he gets out. He spent 18 years for a rape and murder he didn't commit. I love him. He's like a brother to me now, but he's destroyed. You don't come back from this. What happens to someone like that? Do they have any recourse? Is there anything they can do? There's a happy ending in that regard in John's story. I was one of the lawyers that represented him in his civil rights trial. He was awarded $18 million, a million dollars for every year that he was incarcerated. To show you what the lasting psychological damage, we got to go to a civil jury for civil rights violations against Nassau County, which indemnified this cop that framed him. He got some closure that way to the extent that you can get any closure. We were outside waiting for the verdict outside of the courthouse and he's smoking a cigarette and he put out the cigarette and he took a paper bag. He took a plastic bag out of his pocket, grabbed the butt and put it in the plastic bag and sealed it and put it in his pocket. I said, John, what the fuck are you doing? He said, you think I'm going to let someone take my DNA and free me again? That's how bad it is. Think about that in the context of Kamala Harris. To block access to DNA, once you get the fucking DNA, you're still sometimes in a crazy uphill battle because there's prosecutors, in my opinion, just like Kamala Harris, that want to win and want to protect that conviction.