How Kamala Harris' actions changed these Californians' lives forever

Before she was the Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris took actions as California attorney general, San Francisco district attorney and courtroom prosecutor that have left lasting impacts on some, for better or worse.

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Oct. 17, 2024 3 AM PT

Long before Kamala Harris was vice president and the Democratic presidential nominee, she was San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general. Those roles gave her a platform to shape policy — and many people’s lives.

Her years in California politics, including representing the Golden State in the U.S. Senate, remain at the heart of Harris’ political identity.

“During her law enforcement career in California, Kamala Harris was a pragmatic prosecutor who successfully took on predators, fraudsters and cheaters to keep communities safe and defend consumers,” said her campaign spokesperson James Singer.

As Harris campaigns for the nation’s highest office against Republican former President Trump, The Times spoke with several Californians about the lasting impact her actions have had on them, for better or worse.

A transformative recommendation opens doors

Jessica Nowlan photographed in San Francisco where she grew up.

Jessica Nowlan’s first trip to juvenile hall came at age 13, busted for stealing clothes from a mall outside of San Francisco.

Over the next five years, her life would become a revolving door of survival and imprisonment, living on the streets or in group homes and being sent back to juvenile hall over and over again.

“I spent most of my teenage years either on the streets of the Tenderloin or incarcerated,” said Nowlan, who is now 45 and lives in Los Angeles.

“I sold weed, I sold crack, I sold my body … I pretty much did anything I could to survive.”

Along the way, Nowlan heard about an outreach program that trained girls to educate their peers about sexual health and self-sufficiency. By then she was 18 and had a seventh-grade education. The idea of making $9 an hour seemed too good to be true.

“I was paid double minimum wage,” Nowlan said. “I had economic choice, which was something I hadn’t had before.”

Working at the Center for Young Women’s Development in the late 1990s and early 2000s gave Nowlan a “chance to use my experience as expertise.”

It also introduced her to a young lawyer named Kamala Harris.

The organization “provided social services, including job training, to girls and young women who were on the streets or in trouble,” Harris wrote in her memoir, “The Truths We Hold.”

“At the city attorney’s office, I had been working with the same community of women.”

Harris was working on cases involving children who were abused, trafficked and in foster care. She took an interest in the work Nowlan’s center was doing to help girls turn their lives around.

“She would come and we’d sit in circle with her on the floor in our office, and she really did listen to us. She did want to understand more about what we thought we wanted and needed.”

— Jessica Nowlan

“She would come and we’d sit in circle with her on the floor in our office, and she really did listen to us,” Nowlan said. “She did want to understand more about what we thought we wanted and needed.”

Lateefah Simon, who had hired Nowlan at the center, said Harris would pull out an easel to teach the girls lessons about their legal rights.

“Our training room was full to the rafters because we had never seen anybody like Kamala — a super smart, beautiful, young lawyer who loved us,” said Simon, who is now running for Congress. “And I remember Jessica saying, ‘We should do a series. We should have Kamala come all the time.’”

After Harris was elected San Francisco district attorney in 2003, she hired Simon to run an anti-recidivism program in the prosecutor’s office. Then Nowlan began looking for another job.

Jessica Nowlan is photographed in San Francisco.

She had worked her way up to the top at the nonprofit, but with a scant resume and little formal education, Nowlan felt she needed a reference letter to land a good position with a new employer. So she turned to the most powerful person she knew.

“I have known Jessica for a few years, and have worked with her on many projects,” Harris wrote in a letter dated July 19, 2004, on San Francisco district attorney letterhead.

She praised Nowlan for her work at the Center for Young Women’s Development, writing: “I saw the organization thrive under her leadership. Jessica is a hard working young woman.”

The letter helped Nowlan get her next job and ultimately build a career as a social justice leader. She is now the president of Reimagine Freedom, an organization that helps people out of poverty and prison.

And 20 years later, she still has the letter from Harris, tucked into a dog-eared manila folder.

“Never did I think she’d be president,” Nowlan said. “But at that time in my life … to have a professional district attorney write this letter of recommendation for me, it meant a lot then. It has helped me in my career.”

Truancy crackdown ensnares a struggling mother

Chereé Peoples and her daughter Shayla Rucker are photographed at home.

Chereé Peoples remembers the unexpected knock on her door and then an officer putting handcuffs around her wrists and leading her outside, still in her pajamas.

She was confused when Buena Park police officers told her that day in 2013 that she was under arrest for violating California’s truancy laws championed by then-California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris.

Her daughter, Shayla, then 12 years old, has sickle cell anemia and had been in and out of the hospital or too sick to go to class, she said. Her school knew that, she said, and allowed her leeway because of her illness.

“I said, ‘Oh, hell no,’” Peoples, 45, remembers telling officers that day. “I just had a meeting with the school two weeks ago.”

Peoples was taken to jail, where she sat in a cell for hours and was released in time for when her daughter — who was well enough to attend school that day — got out of class. She was one of six parents arrested that day in Orange County and charged with “contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”

School officials said that Peoples had ignored multiple warnings and requests to meet to discuss her child’s absences and did not accept any services such as counseling, according to the Orange County district attorney’s office. Peoples denied that, and said she was uninterested in services such as parenting classes because they could not fix her child’s health.

The arrests were promoted by the Orange County district attorney’s office in a news release, and media were invited to watch Peoples and other parents make what she called a “perp walk” to a police car.

“They made an example out of me,” she said.

Harris promoted policies to get tough on truancy early in her political career, but later said she regretted how the approach criminalized parents like Peoples.

As attorney general, Harris declared a crackdown on chronic absenteeism in schools, calling truancy a “basic threat to public safety” that is “crippling for our economy.”

She pointed to data that showed a correlation between crime and high school dropout rates. Harris called for the expansion of a program she had overseen in San Francisco as district attorney that threatened to prosecute parents whose children missed too much school.

“We are putting parents on notice. If you fail in your responsibility to your kids, we are going to work to make sure you face the full force and consequences of the law,” Harris said in her inauguration speech as attorney general in 2011.

In her book “Smart on Crime,” published in 2009, Harris said she was alarmed by low student attendance rates and believed that, used in tandem with social services, school meetings and community support, the threat of prosecution for parents could work.

Because California law requires children to attend school, she wrote, she had the “statutory right to prosecute parents who do not make sure those children get there.”

In 2010, Harris sponsored a California bill signed into law that made parents of children who missed more than 10% of the school year eligible for a misdemeanor and up to a $2,000 fine or a year in jail.

Harris later distanced herself from the charges pursued by local prosecutors under the state law she sponsored. She had “no control” over that, Harris said on a “Pod Save America” episode while running for president in 2019.

She said that arrests like those of Peoples were an “unintended consequence” of the law, which included a caveat that parents should get many opportunities to correct school attendance before being charged.

“My regret is that I have now heard stories where, in some jurisdictions, D.A.s have criminalized the parents. And I regret that that has happened,” Harris said. “And the thought that anything that I did could have led to that, because that certainly was not the intention — never was the intention.”

Chereé Peoples, 45, right, and her daughter Shayla Rucker, 22, are photographed at home.

But for Peoples, the damage was done.

It took more than two years and several court visits to get her charges dismissed. During that time, her daughter, who is now 22, had a stroke that paralyzed her right side. Peoples could no longer hold down a job, acting as her daughter’s full-time caretaker. During her legal battle, she fell behind on rent, and she and her daughter experienced homelessness, spending nights in hotels or at the Ronald McDonald House.

For that spiral of stress, she partly blames Harris. “At the end of the day, she initiated this law,” she said. “I was prosecuted for advocating for my child.”

Peoples receives a modest income from the state as a health aide to Shayla, who is still frequently hospitalized and often in pain from serious complications of her anemia. She launched a GoFundMe page last month that has so far raised more than $12,000, and her story has been featured in a recent film produced by a right-wing conspiracy theorist critical of Harris.

Peoples told The Times she does not plan to vote for Trump or Harris.

“I thought that the government was meant to help me,” she said, “but it just hindered my life.”

Expanding who can practice law in America

After digging through trash containers to collect cans for cash to pay his way through law school, Sergio Garcia thought his dream of becoming a lawyer was finally near.

He had graduated from Cal Northern School of Law in Chico and passed the bar exam on the first try. But one question on a form from the State Bar of California suspended his fate: Was he a legal U.S. citizen?

The next thing he knew, he was the subject of a years-long court battle. The Obama administration’s Justice Department was fighting against him, arguing that a professional law license was a public benefit inaccessible to immigrants who had entered the country illegally.

Garcia, now 47, had first come to the U.S. from Mexico illegally with his family as an infant and had tried and failed for years to obtain his green card.

In the midst of his legal fight, he got a call from Kamala Harris, then California attorney general.

“I was really scared when I got that call,” said Garcia, who now has legal immigration status.

Her staff told him that she wanted to meet to discuss his case, and that her time was precious. As they sat together in her office in Sacramento, Garcia nervously checked his watch as not to keep her over his 30 allotted minutes. She called him out on it.

She took on a controversial position. It wasn’t anything that got her any points.

— Sergio Garcia

When he explained her staffer’s warnings, Harris said: “Who do you think is their boss? I decide how much time I want to spend with you.”

They talked for nearly an hour, and Harris sent one of her deputy attorneys to represent Garcia in court against the Department of Justice and wrote a court brief in support of him, a move he believes helped him ultimately win the case a few years later.

“No law or policy prevents this court from admitting Garcia to the State Bar,” Harris wrote in the 2012 court brief. “In fact, admitting Garcia to the Bar would be consistent with state and federal policy that encourages immigrants, both documented and undocumented, to contribute to society.”

Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill into law to allow immigrants who had entered the country illegally to practice law, spurred by Garcia’s case, and the California Supreme Court upheld the policy in 2014.

Garcia was admitted to the state bar. He was sworn in as the country’s first undocumented lawyer on the steps of California’s Capitol surrounded by family and friends, and now owns his own personal injury practice in Chico.

He views Harris’ involvement as going out on a limb for him — a move that would help pave the way for others, too. He’s not sure what would have become of his case without her.

Interior of Sergio Garcia's law firm in Chico, Calif.

“She took on a controversial position. It wasn’t anything that got her any points,” Garcia said. “Her and Obama had seemed like they had a really good, close relationship … despite that fact, she goes against him.”

With the celebrations after he received his right to practice law also came criticism and a barrage of racist death threats.

Harris knew disapproval would come, Garcia said, and she advised him to use it as motivation.

“She told me something that I kind of took with me, which was like, look, there are a lot of people out there that are proud of you, that are very happy with everything you have accomplished with so little, despite all the obstacles and challenges you have encountered. But there are also people who cannot wait to see you fail,” he said. “So make sure you don’t give anybody a reason to say, ‘We told you so.’”

Criminal charges against a mentally ill woman

Frances Sheehan standing on a street in San Francisco

Frances Sheehan was living hundreds of miles away in Orange County when she got the call in 2008 that San Francisco police had shot her older sister.

“I hired a criminal attorney to go to the hospital to take her statement, because with the wounds that she had, the doctors were saying it didn’t look good, that they didn’t think she would survive the night,” she recalled.

Teresa Sheehan pulled through. But the ordeal left her with injuries to her leg and face, as well as a legal saga that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and forever turned Frances Sheehan against Kamala Harris.

Teresa Sheehan, who is schizophrenic, was living in a group home for people with mental disabilities when San Francisco police burst into her room and shot her. As San Francisco district attorney, Harris did not prosecute the officers. Instead, she charged Sheehan with assaulting them.

“When police were called to the defendant’s home, she allegedly attempted to assault the responding officers with a knife. The police subdued the defendant by shooting her several times,” Harris’ office wrote in an article in the San Francisco police officers union’s newsletter in October 2008.

A social worker had called police because Teresa Sheehan had threatened him and was not taking her medication, according to court records. When they entered her room, Teresa grabbed a knife and began yelling. The officers retreated into the hallway for several minutes before forcing their way back in. She threatened officers with the knife and they fired at her.

Frances Sheehan couldn’t believe that her sister — still in a wheelchair from taking shots to the leg — was charged with a crime.

“It was just unfathomable,” she said. “We thought there must be a mistake.”

She said she tried to talk to Harris about the case, even sitting on a bench outside the district attorney’s office for hours in the hopes of catching her.

“I wanted to ask her, was she aware of my sister’s mental health case, that she’d been a resident for all these years, diagnosed by multiple doctors?”

When the case went to trial, the jury rejected prosecutors’ argument that Teresa had assaulted the officers. They deadlocked 11-1 in favor of acquittal. Some jurors told the San Francisco Chronicle that they didn’t think she was mentally competent to stand trial. Harris did not retry the case.

Frances Sheehan standing next to a building.

During Harris’ presidential campaign in 2019, her spokesperson said she did her job appropriately in charging Sheehan because the district attorney’s office is responsible for holding people accountable when they are suspected of assaulting police officers.

Sheehan went on to file a lawsuit against the police that wound up in the nation’s highest court. The justices issued a split ruling: They threw out Sheehan’s excessive-force claims against the two officers, ruling they were immune from being sued, but let stand an appellate court ruling that officers failed to make a reasonable accommodation for Sheehan’s mental disability. It’s viewed as a landmark case requiring police to take more care in interacting with people they know are mentally ill.

Teresa is now 72 and lives in a nursing home in San Francisco. She declined to be interviewed.

Frances, 68, said she that was never particularly political but that her sister’s ordeal made her lose faith in Democrats — especially Harris.

“I was a Democrat for many, many years. She changed my mind,” Frances Sheehan said. “I could never vote for that woman. How she came to the steps of the White House — it’s just shocking.”

A couple finally allowed to formalize their love

Kris Perry, left, and Sandy Stier at San Francisco City Hall.

After years of fighting in court to have the right to marry, in 2013 Kris Perry and Sandy Stier got the call they had been waiting for.

The Bay Area couple rushed to change into nicer clothes and dashed off to San Francisco City Hall. Only one of their four sons was in town, and he quickly accepted the role of ring bearer.

“Truly a whirlwind,” Stier recalled.

Perry, 60, and Stier, 62, were plaintiffs in a landmark case that challenged Proposition 8, the measure approved by California voters in 2008 that banned same-sex marriage.

Just hours after a federal appeals court resumed gay marriages in California in 2013 after a years-long legal battle, the lesbian couple were among the first in the state to marry.

They were half joking when they suggested that Kamala Harris, who as California attorney general had supported gay marriage rights despite a statewide ban, officiate the ceremony.

To their surprise, she said yes.

“She walked in, and it was like an electric moment because we had all been a part of this journey,” Perry said. “She was so excited for us, and really for everybody. The rest is history — literally.”

We saw her as a champion for us, for women, for so many others who needed her support. And she could be counted upon to give it.

— Sandy Stier

Perry, executive director of the nonprofit Children and Screens, and Stier, who works for Santa Clara County, have been together for nearly 25 years. They credit Harris not just for helping formalize their love, but for her support for LGBTQ+ rights years ahead of many other Democrats.

“We knew she was on the right side of marriage equality,” Stier said. “We saw her as a champion for us, for women, for so many others who needed her support. And she could be counted upon to give it.”

Harris was elected as attorney general just two years after California voters approved Proposition 8, throwing the future of thousands of couples like Stier and Perry into limbo. But she refused to defend the law as the state’s top law enforcement officer, criticizing the ban as unconstitutional.

Sandy Stier, left, and Kris Perry in front of San Francisco City Hall.

“You must start the marriages immediately,” a triumphant Harris told a city clerk in Los Angeles County on the phone in 2013 to applause, after a court lifted an injunction that stalled gay marriages in the state. “Have a good day, and enjoy it. It’s going to be fun.”

Perry and Stier would stay in touch with Harris over the years, driving her in the San Francisco LGBTQ+ Pride parade during her first presidential run, and supporting her at the Democratic National Convention this year.

Perry grew up in a conservative community in the Central Valley. For her, being able to have a marriage certificate and a ring like her straight friends meant more than a formality.

“I believed almost my entire life that I wasn’t as good as other people, that I was never equal to other people, because of my sexual orientation. I absorbed that. It made me feel second class,” Perry said. “And so it was really important that the government didn’t say what we could or couldn’t be. We should get to say what we will or won’t be.”

An unanswered plea from death row

Advocates for Kevin Cooper, Zanetta Fredericks, Zoe Marinkovich, and Gavrilah Well near San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.

Kevin Cooper has spent nearly 40 years on death row for four brutal murders he says he did not commit.

For his decades living behind bars wondering when he would be put to death — an existence he describes as “torture” — he partly blames Harris.

As California attorney general, Harris denied Cooper’s request to conduct additional DNA tests on evidence found at a gruesome murder scene that rocked Chino Hills in 1983. Doug and Peg Ryen, both 41; their 10-year-old daughter Jessica Ryen and 11-year-old family friend Chris Hughes were “hacked and stabbed” to death in the Ryen home.

Cooper, who had escaped a local prison where he was serving time for burglary, was hiding out in a house nearby and was charged with their murders.

Since then, Cooper has maintained his innocence, and a litany of courts and politicians have gone back and forth about the legitimacy of his case as he accuses San Bernardino County law enforcement of framing him and planting evidence.

I am innocent. I really am innocent.

— Kevin Cooper

“I am innocent. I really am innocent,” Cooper, 66, told The Times by phone from the California Health Care Facility, a state prison in Stockton where he was recently transferred from San Quentin’s death row. “I was uneducated, miseducated as a kid, and I put myself in a position for the police to get their hands on you ... I’m not a murderer.”

He has lost more than a dozen appeals and was scheduled to be executed in 2004 when he received a last-minute stay from the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Shortly after taking office in 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom imposed a moratorium on all executions in California.

In 2000, a new state law gave convicted felons the right to request DNA testing to support claims of innocence. Cooper was the first death row inmate in California to make the request, and the findings in 2002 linked him to the murders, according to the attorney general’s office.

After the New York Times posed new questions about Cooper’s conviction in 2018, Harris — then a U.S. senator — called on Gov. Jerry Brown to do what she did not as attorney general: conduct more DNA testing in the case.

“My career as a prosecutor was marked by fierce opposition to the death penalty while still upholding the law and a commitment to fixing a broken criminal justice system,” she said then.

Brown ordered DNA tests, and later, Newsom ordered an independent investigation of Cooper’s case. The latest inquiry found Cooper’s DNA at the scene and declared that evidence of his guilt was “extensive and conclusive.”

But Cooper and his supporters — including human rights advocates Gavrilah Wells; Zanetta Fredericks and Zoe Marinkovich — believe his DNA was planted at the scene by officers because he was a convenient target as public pressure mounted to find the killers after the murders terrorized the community.

Gavrilah Wells, left, Zanetta Fredericks and Zoe Marinkovich near San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.

Cooper says he believes if Harris had intervened sooner, things would be different.

“When we got the DNA test, the vast majority of the DNA which would have exonerated me was degraded. It would not have been degraded if Kamala Harris had gave it to me back then,” he said.

A key piece of the case at issue: Then 8-year-old Josh Ryen, whose throat was slit by the murderer who killed his parents and sister, initially told police that he saw three white or Hispanic men in his home that night. Cooper is Black.

The San Bernardino County district attorney’s office has criticized critics for prolonging Cooper’s case.

“When will enough be enough for the sensationalists who have robbed the victims and surviving family members of closure from the heinous acts of a convicted murderer?” Dist. Atty. Jason Anderson said in a statement last year.

Cooper announced this summer that he forgives Harris for denying the DNA testing after discussing it with Wells, Fredericks and Marinkovich. He rejected former President Trump supporters’ use of his story to criticize the Democratic presidential nominee.

Yet Cooper remains disappointed in Harris for not seeing what he believes was a case of racist cops profiling and locking up a Black man for a crime he did not commit.

“My family, who is Black, believed that now that we had a woman — a Black woman who was supposed to care about Black people — become the attorney general of the state of California, she would do what those white men who sat in that seat before her would not do: give me some type of justice,” he said.