By Steve Marshall
Wednesday, September 02, 2020
You might have forgotten the first time you heard the
name Kamala Harris. It was probably 16 years ago, when Harris found Democrats,
along with decent people of all political persuasions, united against her.
At the time, the story of a murdered California policeman
had become national news amid widespread indignation over Harris’s role in the
case. Her actions revealed her true nature as a ruthless partisan committed über
alles to the causes embraced by far-left ideologues — even when that
commitment meant denying justice to a fallen officer and inflicting injustice
on his family and law-enforcement colleagues.
On the night of April 10, 2004, San Francisco police
officer Isaac Espinoza and his partner, Barry Parker, were patrolling the
city’s Bayview District. Despite Bayview’s being a notoriously high-crime
neighborhood filled with danger, a selfless sense of duty had led Officer
Espinoza to request it as his assignment “because he felt he made the most
impact as a cop there.”
As the officers drove the streets, they noticed a man in
a long, dark coat who appeared to be acting in a suspicious manner, walking
with only one of his arms swinging naturally, as if he were trying to conceal
something. They decided they should pull over to stop and talk to him. Officer
Espinoza exited the patrol car and followed the man on foot, calling out an
order to halt and identifying himself as law enforcement. The man — later
identified as David Hill — first sped up before eventually slowing and
stopping. He turned around, lifted the AK-47 rifle he had been hiding, and
opened fire, murdering Officer Espinoza, who had never even unholstered his
service weapon.
Hill was a member of the West Mob, a criminal street gang
that terrorized those who lived and worked within its geographic “territory” by
committing rapes, homicides, assaults with firearms, narcotic sales, car
thefts, burglaries, and robberies. As an expert testified at trial,
“Retaliation against a [rival] gang member sends a message to other gang
members, but the murder of a police officer sends a message to the community:
‘Hey, even your protectors can be touched.’”
That was Officer Espinoza: a protector of the community,
a devoted husband to his wife, and a doting father to his three-year-old
daughter, cut down in cold blood.
Just three days after Espinoza’s murder, before he had
been laid to rest and without caring to call his widow, Harris, who was then
the San Francisco district attorney, invited reporters and camera crews to a
news conference to announce that she would not seek a death sentence in the
case. Per the New York Times, she argued that doing so would “send the
wrong message” and be “a poor use of money.” But California assemblyman Joseph
Canciamilla, a fellow Democrat, explained it better: “This is clearly a case
where local politics took precedence over the facts of the case and a
deliberative review of the circumstances.”
Indeed, members of Harris’s own political party were
admirably united against her decision. Both of California’s U.S. senators at
the time, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, spoke out against it and called
for the death penalty in the case.
Senator Feinstein, speaking at Officer Espinoza’s
funeral, received a standing ovation after passionately arguing that “this is
not only the definition of tragic, but it is one of the special circumstances
called for in the death-penalty law passed by the state of California.”
Senator Boxer announced that “when a police officer is
murdered, those responsible should be punished to the fullest extent of the
law,” and urged federal officials to bring a capital case against Hill if
Harris wouldn’t.
Even San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, who is now the
governor of the state, was greatly disturbed by the miscarriage of justice. “I
never thought something could challenge me in terms of my strong opposition to
the death penalty,” he said. “But this experience has rattled my view. It
really has.”
As the story spread from the West Coast to the East
Coast, the sentiments felt nationwide by public officials and private citizens
alike were put into words by Officer Espinoza’s mother: Her son had “made the
ultimate sacrifice,” she said, yet he was being denied “the ultimate justice.”
(For Hill, Officer Espinoza’s murderer, this was a cause for celebration. He
has said that he’s “forever grateful” to Harris, and praised her “courage and
integrity.”)
It is not unreasonable to assume that, based on Joe
Biden’s age and declining mental acuity, his vice president would wield
extraordinary power and might even become president. Given those possibilities,
we would do well to reflect on the case of Officer Isaac Espinoza and consider
what a Biden-Harris administration could portend for law and justice in the
United States, as well as for the brave men and women of law enforcement who,
night and day, stand guard to protect us.
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