SAUNDERS: Kamala Harris and her death penalty tap dance

WASHINGTON

In 2019, presidential candidate Kamala Harris opposed capital punishment. “Kamala believes the death penalty is immoral, discriminatory, ineffective and a gross misuse of taxpayer dollars,” her campaign website offered.

In 2024, presidential candidate Harris, now the vice president, is being mysterious about her position on the death penalty. “Harris won’t say whether she still wants to end death penalty,” read an Axios headline Wednesday.

Axios reached out to the campaign and got no answer — which is par for her this year, but odd considering Harris campaigned to be president proudly asserting her opposition to the death penalty.

In 2003, Harris said she would not seek the death penalty when she ran for San Francisco district attorney — and she won. No surprise there. Harris was telling San Francisco voters what they wanted to hear.

In 2004, Harris enraged San Francisco law enforcement when she announced she would not violate her campaign promise after a gang member gunned down San Francisco police officer Isaac Espinoza.

The decision didn’t hurt her when she ran for re-election, but it sent shock waves through the law enforcement community.

As then-San Francisco Police Officer Association President Gary Delagnes later told CNN, “I’m standing there and I’m going, ‘Oh my God. The kid’s not even in the ground yet. You’re thinking to yourself, ‘OK, is she sorry that this kid died or is this just a political opportunity? Is this just an opportunity for her to double down on the fact she’s not going to pursue the death penalty?’”

Worst of all: Harris did not have the decency to inform the slain officer’s 27-year-old widow, Renata Espinoza, ahead of her announcement.

“She did not call me,” Espinoza told CNN in 2019. “I don’t understand why she went on camera to say that without talking to the family. It’s like, you can’t even wait till he’s buried?”

The late Sen. Dianne Feinstein received a standing ovation when she said at the young officer’s memorial, “This is not only the definition of tragedy, it’s the special circumstance called for by the death penalty law.”

As former Mayor and Police Chief Frank Jordan argued at the time, Harris never should have pledged not to seek the death penalty because that pledge closed the door to seeking the worst punishment for special circumstances. That argument stands even if San Francisco jurors seemed unlikely to condemn a cop killer to lethal injection.

One other thing: The pledge meant that plea bargains that could allow killers to avoid capital punishment if they admitted guilt suddenly were off the table. Ah, the wages of virtue signaling.

At the time, Harris preened that she was sticking to her principles.

Unlike San Franciscans, California voters supported the death penalty. So when Harris ran to be California’s attorney general in 2010, those alleged principles got in the way. So she ditched them. She said she would “enforce the death penalty as the law dictates.”

But really, the law didn’t change. Harris did.

And I’d say she can do it again, right after the election. But right now, the vice president doesn’t have a position.

Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.