This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 13, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Joe Biden has selected Kamala Harris, a US senator from California,

and before that a career prosecutor, as his running mate for the presidency.

What should we take away from Harris's time as a prosecutor and lawmaker?

Cato's J. Schweikert argues that while Kamala Harris did many questionable things as a prosecutor,

she wasn't exactly behaving outside the norms for prosecutors generally.

And that may say more about our criminal justice system than about Harris personally.

We spoke yesterday.

What do you make of Kamala Harris?

Her background was the top cop in California. Before that she was San Francisco DA.

What should we know about her as a as a prosecutor?

So I think it's you know it's important to note that I mean I don't

know that I have a lot of original you know insights to add on Kamala Harris's background as a prosecutor I think it is the criticism of her as a

fairly aggressive prosecutor who had a lot of opportunities to enact more sensible, humane

policies and failed to do so is legitimate.

I think there are lots of examples of that from her time both as a DA and as Attorney General for California.

I think a few of the most notable examples there is that back in 2005 she opposed a Brady policy for her office

basically a policy of disclosing information to defendants that may help them in their criminal trials as

prosecutors are required to do under the Supreme Court's Brady decision.

A lot of offices at the time were enacting fairly robust policies to comply with that decision, and she declined to do so, which resulted in a lot of defendants being denied information that would have been helpful in defending themselves at trial.

And one of the most obvious outcomes of that was the crime lab scandal in her district in 2010 where a lab tech named Deborah Madden was found

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