By Bob Egelko, Courts ReporterAug 27, 2024 (SFChronicle.com)
The 2024 Democratic party platform signals a move to the center on criminal justice reminiscent of the Bill Clinton era, without a call to end the death penalty or the war on drugs.Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle
As a presidential candidate in 2020, Kamala Harris cited her longtime opposition to the death penalty, which she described as “deeply immoral, irreversible, and ineffective.” After his election, Joe Biden became the first U.S. president to publicly oppose capital punishment, while reinstating a moratorium on federal executions that Donald Trump had rescinded. And the Democratic Party platform for 2020 called for abolition of the death penalty.
But the platform adopted at last week’s Democratic convention, which nominated Vice President Harris to succeed Biden, did not mention the death penalty.
Nor — unlike the 2020 platform — did it call for ending the “war on drugs,” for repealing mandatory prison sentences for specified federal crimes, or for eliminating qualified immunity, the Supreme Court doctrine that can make it virtually impossible to sue police for violation of one’s civil rights.
The platform also includes a statement that “we need to fund the police, not defund the police.”
There were still substantial differences between Democrats and Republicans, whose agenda includes large-scale executions, fewer restrictions on police searches, rejection of unidentified “Marxist prosecutors,” and “the largest deportation program in American history.” But the Democratic platform on crime and punishment, which drew little attention at the Chicago convention, suggests a shift in ideology.
It seems “largely consistent with the approach Kamala Harris staked out when she was (San Francisco) district attorney and then (California) attorney general, a centrist approach to criminal justice,” said David Sklansky, a Stanford law professor and former federal prosecutor.
He cited then-D.A. Harris’ 2009 book “Smart on Crime,” which called for tough policing as well as compassion for those caught up in crime. Sklansky said there were elements of both in the 2024 Democratic platform, which calls for restrictions on solitary confinement in prison and on choke holds by police, as well as more education and employment programs for released prisoners and bans on dangerous firearms.
The party’s stance is reminiscent of the policies of President Bill Clinton, said Robert Weisberg, another Stanford law professor and co-director of the school’s Criminal Justice Center. He said Clinton took office in 1993, for the first of his two terms, as “a somewhat centrist ‘New Democrat’ who wanted to immunize the party from soft-on-crime attacks.”
In 1994, Clinton — with the help of Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del. — signed a sweeping crime bill that increased federal sentences, encouraged states to do the same, broadened the federal death penalty and provided substantial funding for additional police and prisons. It also included a nationwide ban on semiautomatic rifles, sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that Congress allowed to expire 10 years later.
Weisberg noted that Harris, as a 2020 presidential hopeful, faced resistance from some on the left because of her background as a prosecutor.
Like every San Francisco district attorney since 1995 she refused to seek death sentences in murder cases, but took heat from conservatives — and from Feinstein — for declining to file capital charges against the man who fatally shot Police Officer Isaac Espinoza in 2004. The defendant, David Hill, was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
At the same time, she drew criticism from liberals as attorney general for appealing a federal judge’s 2014 ruling that California’s death penalty law was unconstitutionally arbitrary because condemned prisoners had to wait 20 years or more to get legal representation and have their appeals decided.
A federal appeals court reversed the ruling and kept the death penalty in effect, although California, with more than 630 prisoners sentenced to death, has not executed anyone since 2006. As attorney general, Harris said she was legally required to defend state laws in court unless she considered them unconstitutional — such as the ban on same-sex marriage that was approved by California voters in 2008 and struck down by federal courts in 2013.
She has not publicly discussed the death penalty during her current campaign. Trump, on the other hand, has called for making some non-murder crimes, such as drug-dealing and human trafficking, punishable by death, despite a 2008 Supreme Court ruling declaring the death penalty unconstitutional for non-homicide offenses against civilians.
Project 2025, an ultraconservative blueprint for a future Republican administration whose drafters included 140 former Trump administration officials, has called for the immediate executions of all 40 federal prisoners who have been sentenced to death.
And Trump has also promised to pardon all those convicted of crimes for their participation in the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol — a pledge that Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, called “outrageous and destabilizing.”
Levenson is a former federal prosecutor and founding director of her school’s Project for the Innocent. She said the Democratic platform “is silent because there’s no gain in being too specific on criminal justice issues.”
The position it apparently wants to present to the public, she said, is that “we want to reduce crime, but we want to be humane in our approach.”
Reach Bob Egelko: begelko@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @BobEgelko
Aug 27, 2024
COURTS REPORTER
Bob Egelko has been a reporter since June 1970. He spent 30 years with the Associated Press, covering news, politics and occasionally sports in Los Angeles, San Diego and Sacramento, and legal affairs in San Francisco from 1984 onward. He worked for the San Francisco Examiner for five months in 2000, then joined The Chronicle in November 2000.His beat includes state and federal courts in California, the Supreme Court and the State Bar. He has a law degree from McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento and is a member of the bar. Coverage has included the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, the appointment of Rose Bird to the state Supreme Court and her removal by the voters, the death penalty in California and the battles over gay rights and same-sex marriage.
