With only a week left until the election, Vice President Kamala Harris plans to give a speech on Tuesday in Washington that she is billing as the closing argument of her presidential campaign.
Her courtroom approach decades ago could shed light on how she will make her final plea to voters. Long before Ms. Harris was vice president, she was a young lawyer in the San Francisco Bay Area, asking juries to convict people accused of murder and rape.
The New York Times unearthed transcripts from six felony trials that Ms. Harris prosecuted to review her closing statements. They come from a rare stretch in her professional life when few eyes were on her: She was assigned dozens of felony cases when she was an Alameda County prosecutor from 1990 to 1998, but only a fraction of them went to trial.
The transcripts offer one sense of how Ms. Harris thinks and tackles problems, revealing a persuasive and disciplined prosecutor who was able to minimize facts that didn’t help her case. She also positioned herself as a voice for women, a stance she has maintained throughout her rise in politics, and showed little patience for male defendants who acted with false bravado and preyed on the vulnerable.
Sharmin Bock, an attorney who worked closely with Ms. Harris in Alameda County, recalled sitting on the courthouse steps with Ms. Harris in the 1990s to discuss trial strategies. Ms. Bock says she sometimes sees glimmers of those days as she watches Ms. Harris on the campaign trail. “I see Kamala talking to her jury,” she said.
‘Showing the math’ to jurors
It was March 11, 1996, just after a lunch recess at the Hayward, Calif., courthouse, and Ms. Harris approached the jury box. “Who would have thought you’d be sitting paces away from a murderer,” she began her closing argument.
Ms. Harris was pushing for John’el Bailey, 17, to be convicted of first-degree murder for shooting and killing an acquaintance on the streets of Oakland. Ms. Harris, then 31, had just begun trying felony cases on her own. She would rehearse and rehearse beforehand, but “the stakes were so high, it never felt like enough,” Ms. Harris later said.
Her nerves were noticeable even to the young defendant. Mr. Bailey, recently reached by phone, recalled that Ms. Harris was tough in court but seemed shy and laughed often, perhaps from anxiety.
“I could tell that she was new, as nervous as I was,” said Mr. Bailey, now 46.
During her closing argument, Ms. Harris walked through each element of the relevant laws in Bailey’s case. She called it “showing the math,” a way to provide jurors with every fact so that they could decide on their own whether it all added up to a conviction.
Alone, this method ran the risk of boring juries. But Ms. Harris peppered in jokes and references to the detective show “Columbo” or the terrible traffic on the nearby interstate. She moved around the courtroom and sometimes delivered closing arguments without notes, “speaking to these 12 people like she was in a living room,” said Amy Resner, an attorney who met Ms. Harris early in her career.
Ms. Harris also coupled her methodical style with conclusions so blunt that they seemed crafted by a TV writers’ room, recalled William Kaufmann, a defense attorney who argued a felony robbery case against her in 1996. Mr. Kaufmann, now 80, says he still remembers the case because of how well his opponent eviscerated his closing argument.
“She annoyed me and impressed me at the same time,” he said.
The trial against Mr. Bailey resulted in a second-degree murder conviction. Mr. Bailey’s attorneys had argued that he was an adolescent, not a hardened criminal, and had killed a gang member nearly twice his age in self-defense. Ms. Harris rejected that narrative in a few lines.
“This defendant is a predator,” Ms. Harris said. “He may be young. That doesn’t make him any less of a predator. He killed.”
Mr. Bailey was sentenced to 19 years to life in prison and is currently incarcerated at a state prison in the Central Valley of California. He said in a recent interview that he had been a troubled teenager who had a turbulent childhood and was at times homeless. He now has his G.E.D. and has developed a love of reading and writing.
Mr. Bailey said it was unfair that he had been tried as an adult by Ms. Harris. He has spent years unsuccessfully appealing his conviction and being denied parole.
Calling out the sexism of male defendants
In June 1995, Ms. Harris spent five days trying to persuade jurors that Getnet Abebe murdered his girlfriend, Almaz Gebere.
Mr. Abebe, who cleaned hotels in San Francisco, was found in his Oakland apartment in December 1993 with a loaded gun while Ms. Gebere, 38, was bleeding profusely from a bullet in her temple.
Mr. Abebe, 33 at the time of the killing, admitted that he had retrieved his gun from the closet when Ms. Gebere had come over that night, and that he snatched the phone out of her hands when she called a man that she had been seeing.
But some key evidence cast doubt on Ms. Harris’s argument.
Sheared bullet fragments retrieved from the scene suggested that the bullet that killed Ms. Gebere had first ricocheted off a hard surface. Mr. Abebe’s defense attorney asserted that the gun had accidentally discharged during a struggle and asked how Mr. Abebe could be guilty of murder if he hadn’t been aiming the gun at her.
“So what?” Ms. Harris responded during her closing argument. She largely dismissed the contradictory evidence and instead focused on a comment that Mr. Abebe had made earlier in the trial.
On the witness stand, Mr. Abebe told Ms. Harris that in Ethiopia, from which he and Ms. Gebere were refugees, women couldn’t have visitors at their homes when their husbands were away. The rule didn’t apply to men, he told Ms. Harris, because “a man is a man.”
Ms. Harris transformed those five words into a damning argument. She said that Mr. Abebe believed that he was justified in killing Ms. Gebere because he saw her as a woman who broke the rules.
“He’s very deliberate. He has his own opinions about what should be and what should not be,” Ms. Harris told the jury.
She added: “He said, ‘A man is a man.’”
It was one of several trials in which Ms. Harris argued that male defendants were driven by anger toward women or a desire to appear tough. In the case against Mr. Bailey, she called him out for trying to be “real macho.” In a case in which a man scalped his girlfriend with a kitchen knife, Ms. Harris framed the brutal crime as part of a long history of “punishing, embarrassing, disfiguring women.”
“It’s not unlike what the Nazis did in Germany to the women. They would remove the hair,” she said during that trial.
In the case against Mr. Abebe, Ms. Harris concluded her closing argument by speaking for the woman who had been killed. She reminded the jury that Ms. Gebere “cannot testify.”
“However, what she can give us, she gives us the wounds that she suffered. In those wounds, we know how it happened,” Ms. Harris said.
The jury convicted Mr. Abebe of second-degree murder, though Ms. Harris had been pushing for first-degree. He was sentenced to 19 years to life, and is incarcerated in a California state prison.
Reframing weak spots in her case
There was no case with a more complicated set of facts than one Ms. Harris argued in August 1997.
She had recently moved into a unit prosecuting sex crimes, and had been assigned a case in which two men had been accused of gang raping a 13-year-old girl in an abandoned house in Oakland.
But the girl gave inconsistent statements about details of the crime. She told the police that the men had kidnapped her, but later admitted that she had left with them willingly from the group home where she lived.
The girl could not identify the other four men who she said had been part of the rape. She had injuries that confirmed an assault had taken place, as well as semen in her underwear, but the DNA evidence didn’t match either of the defendants that Ms. Harris was prosecuting, a forensic scientist testified.
When it came time for her closing argument, Ms. Harris decided to get ahead of jurors’ potential concerns. She could tell the girl had not made a good impression, and seemed as though “she had contempt for the whole experience — the defendants, the court, even the jury,” Ms. Harris later recalled.
“I know most of you didn’t like” the girl, Ms. Harris began her closing argument. “She was rude. She was a bit offensive.”
“But the law does not say that you have to like the victim in order to decide that she should be protected,” Ms. Harris said.
Ms. Harris said the girl had lied to the police because she didn’t think anyone would believe her version of the events if she admitted that she had chosen to hang out with the older men. She was a child, Ms. Harris told the jury, and being neglected for most of her life had made her “emotionally immature” and unable to trust anyone.
Then Ms. Harris made a surprising turn: The girl’s inconsistencies and vulnerabilities were actually a reason that the men had targeted her for horrific crimes, she said. The men figured that jurors wouldn’t take the girl’s allegations seriously, Ms. Harris continued, calling her “the perfect victim for people like them.”
“They are predators, and they pick their prey,” she said.
The jury found Carven Evans and Ralph Lee Jr., both in their early 20s at the time, guilty of raping a minor and other related counts. Mr. Evans was sentenced to 18 years in prison and Mr. Lee to 14 years.
In the decades since, Ms. Harris has called the case a pivotal moment in her career, as she was inspired by the jury’s decision to hold the girl’s attackers accountable.
The guilty verdict reinforced “the importance of the higher notion of justice for all,” she said in her 2009 book, “Smart on Crime.” “The law applies to everyone, and for good reason.”
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