As DA, Kamala Harris let ‘gay panic’ killer get parole after serving just 5 years

More evidence has surfaced that Democrat coup leader Kamala Harris put politics over people’s lives during her legal career in California. As the District Attorney of San Francisco in the early 2000s, Harris pushed through plea deals with reduced sentencing for many defendants in hopes of inflating her success record in the job.

One such case, which has been chronicled by the Bay Area Reporter, involved James McKinnon, 37, who killed 56-year-old Gary Lee Ober, a gay man and Vietnam vet, and subsequently allowed his body to rot in the apartment for weeks as McKinnon stole Ober’s money and sold his possessions. McKinnon admitted to committing the 2002 murder, but he claimed after the fact that it was in self defense in response to an attempted sexual assault. McKinnon claimed he sustained bruises after physically fighting off Ober’s sexual advances despite the fact that Ober was 20 years his senior and had difficulty standing and walking due to a back condition. Furthermore, the medical examiner ruled that Ober’s death was caused by cutting wounds into the chest, not necessarily stab wounds, which would be more consistent with a self-defense claim.  

McKinnon also had a previous record of violence and abuse of older men. He had worked as a home health provider and was accused of abusing Luther Chattman, a disabled 68-year-old man. McKinnon was, at one point, facing simultaneous charges for abusing Chattman and killing Ober.  

According to Ober’s neighbor Stephanie Henry, McKinnon lived with Ober for many days before the killing, and when she asked where he was after several days of him being absent, McKinnon responded that Ober was on a cruise. McKinnon also contested that he is not gay or bisexual, yet he admitted to having an attraction to men and frequenting the bars in the Castro, the homosexual Mecca of San Francisco.

Despite the confession and plethora of evidence against him, Kamala Harris as DA allowed McKinnon to plead guilty to a lesser charge of manslaughter. At the time, Harris claimed there was not enough evidence to prove that the murder was premeditated and accepted McKinnon’s self-defense against sexual assault allegation, what is now colloquially known as the “gay panic” defense. On top of his lesser sentence for Ober’s death Harris also agreed to completely drop all charges in the Chattman case.

McKinnon was released from prison on parole in 2007, serving less than five years for the crime, much to the infuriation of Ober’s friends and family. One friend, Frank Franco, reportedly blasted Harris at the time for allowing a dangerous man to walk the streets again and not prosecuting the crime when she had the chance. “There was plenty of evidence this guy was violent and dangerous,” Franco said. “I think the DA dropped the ball big time in this case.” Also at the time, DA Harris and her office did not notify any of the witnesses in the McKinnon case of his release. The witnesses only learned about it from news reports.

A closer examination shows that Kamala Harris seems to have been acting in her own political interests and not the interests of justice or law and order. In 2003, Harris defeated the previous San Francisco DA in an election promising to be “smart on crime”. In the hopes of closing the number of open and backlogged cases and to look good and competent in the public’s eye, she reduced the sentences of many homicide cases, including McKinnon’s, allowing the defendants to take plea bargains. In total, 32 homicides were reduced to manslaughter or even lesser crimes like burglary and assault.

Then-DA Harris allowed McKinnon to plead guilty using the “gay panic” defense. However, in 2020, she lauded New Jersey for outlawing the use of such an excuse. “The ‘gay/trans panic’ defense has been used to justify horrific acts of violence against the LGBTQ+ community. I was proud to help make California the first state to outlaw it when I was San Francisco’s District Attorney and am happy to hear New Jersey is following suit. Let’s ban the ‘gay/trans panic’ defense everywhere,” Harris previously wrote. In reality, she arranged for a killer who used “gay panic” to get away with a slap on the wrist–all because it would help her numbers as the newly elected DA.

Hypocritical Harris’s double standard does not stop there. The progressive left is constantly shrieking about white supremacy and institutional racism. It is interesting that Kamala Harris, the savior of the Democrats and a self-professed black woman, seems to have actually propagated some of that racism. As Attorney General of California, Harris all but bent over backwards to weaponize technicalities and keep black men in prison even when evidence supported that they might be innocent: Kevin Cooper and George Gage are just two examples. Yet just a few years prior, in the McKinnon case, Harris ignored evidence of guilt and let a white man get off almost scot-free all for political expediency.

Where are the cries of injustice and accusations of racism? Oh yes, they are being lobbed at former President Donald Trump. However, Trump was the one who was able to get criminal justice reform passed via the First Step Act, which has actually helped many minority communities in America. Kamala Harris can make no such claim. Instead, she continuously lies about and distorts her prosecutorial record, but in the end she has only ever acted in her own selfish interests, and there is no sign of that changing if she were to become president.