Campaigning on an anti-capital punishment platform was an easy call for Kamala Harris when the candidate of Indian and African American heritage ran for district attorney in San Francisco, where juries almost never send people to death row.
But sticking to that position after she got the job has been a lot harder. After the first slaying of an on-duty police officer here in 10 years, Harris has faced mounting pressure to reverse her decision not to seek the death penalty against the officer’s accused killer.
The San Francisco Police Officers Association called on Harris to recuse herself and her office from the case and to turn it over to California’s attorney general. The move followed an April 21 two-hour meeting that the union organized after angry rank-and-file officers started circulating a petition urging Harris to reconsider and planned a march on her office.
“The murder of Officer Isaac Espinoza has taken our members to a new level of frustration, emotion, anger,” said union President Gary Delagnes, surrounded by about 200 grim-faced officers, those in uniform still wearing black mourning bands over their badges. “And I think at this point , what we are asking is that the district attorney of San Francisco do her job.”
“Officer Isaac Espinoza made the ultimate sacrifice. We believe, in the interest of justice, his killer should also pay the ultimate price,” Delagnes said, adding that the union had the backing of Police Chief Heather Fong, who refused to comment.
Harris wasn’t persuaded by the unified front shown by the police.
“I have a responsibility to uphold the law, enforce the law and prosecute crimes and I intend to do it in this tragic case,” she said. “I have not been presented with a situation where I require the assistance of the attorney general.”
Harris, citing her moral opposition to capital punishment as well as the unlikely odds of obtaining a death sentence in San Francisco, announced she would pursue a sentence of life without parole for David Hill, 21, less than three days after Espinoza, 29, was gunned down with an assault rifle on April 10. Hill has pleaded not guilty.
At the time, it appeared that Harris had the police department’s reluctant backing. Delagnes stood shoulder to shoulder with her at a news conference and said she had a point about the difficulty of persuading a San Francisco jury to condemn criminals to death.
The backlash erupted at Espinoza’s April 16 funeral, when Sen. Dianne Feinstein drew a standing ovation with her statement that a police officer’s death is “the special circumstance called for by the death penalty law.” Later, Feinstein said she never would have endorsed Harris had she known her opposition to the death penalty extended to officers.
Along with the petition drive, the senator’s candor prompted Fong and her command staff to issue a memo to the department’s 2,100 officers stating they wanted Harris to change her stand.
“To do anything less dishonors the memory of all fallen officers and diminishes the lives of those who, on a daily basis, risk their lives for the sake of the public’s safety,” they wrote.
The last officer to be killed on duty in San Francisco was James Guelff, who was shot by Vic Lee Boutwell, a carjacker, in November 1994. Police fatally shot Boutwell before he could be arrested. According to statistics compiled by Harris’s office, only two people have received death sentences from San Francisco juries during the last 40 years, and neither was charged with killing an officer.
Fifteen people were arrested and prosecuted in the deaths of 11 San Francisco officers since 1956, but none of them were sentenced to death. Four of the killings occurred between 1972, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared California’s capital punishment law unconstitutional, and 1978, when it was reinstated, according to the district attorney’s records.
— Lisa Leff
