How Kamala Tried to Destroy Trulove

And How Trulove Won Out in the End

Picture this: July 23, 2007, San Francisco. A hot summer night at a gritty housing project with the mocking name of Sunnydale. It’s close to midnight and about two dozen people are loitering in the street. Nothing unusual about that. There seems to be a bit of a scuffle or maybe a chase, when shots are fired. A local resident named Seu Kuka is shot multiple times, and dies at the scene. A woman named Priscilla Lualemaga was looking out her second floor window and saw it happen. Lualemaga not only knows some of the people in the street, she’s a distant relative of Kuka. The police arrive with lights and sirens and they question Lualemaga while others search for the shooter. In her first interrogation, Lualemaga said she saw somebody shoot Kuka, but it was so dark, she couldn’t see who it was. The shooting was preceded by somebody running after Kuka, but she did not know who was chasing him. Police find and arrest a man named Jamal Trulove (everybody in this story has a funny name). Trulove and Kuka had been friends.

In no interviews or reports of this story did anyone say what the motive might have been.

Kamala Harris is District Attorney (DA) in San Francisco, her first big job in politics. She got the job in 2004, boasting to be the San Francisco’s first female AG. Also its first South-Asian-American AG. And its first Black AG. Her official bio from that time lists all of those titles and also claims that she was raised in the East Bay Area of California—which is not quite true. Kamala grew up in Montreal. (Of course, a lot of things said about Kamala are not quite true.) Extraordinarily ambitious but not particularly smart, Kamala wants to run for California Attorney General (AG) in 2010, but she needs a stout conviction rate to be a viable contender.

As DA, Kamala wasn’t directly involved in this case but her office oversaw everything and she signed off on various aspects of it. The prosecuting attorney in this case worked for Kamala. Kamala was very intersted in racking up convictions, so she certainly knew what was going on. And according to Trulove, AG Harris popped into the courtroom twice: once on the day he was convicted and once on the day he was sentenced.

Trulove got convicted and was sentenced to 50 years to life in prison for first-degree murder. Just 25 years old at the time, Trulove was an aspiring hip-hop artist and actor starting to break through; he had been on national televison. He was no big-name celebrity, but he was starting to get noticed. Trulove was close to his own family, particularly his mother, and he had four young children.

The case was investigated by two Oakland cops, Maureen D’Amico and Michael Johnson, who allegedly fabricated evidence and had exculpatory material they did not bother to share. Trulove alleged that the two officers “manipulated” or somehow coerced the second-story witness, Priscilla Lualemaga, into giving false testimony. Both officers have since retired from the force, and there was never any disciplinary action taken although a jury would later find them guilty of fabricating evidence. D’Amico and Johnson did not investigate any other suspects that night. They focused entirely on Trulove, although many other people were at the scene of the shooting.

Priscilla Lualemaga changed her story. Or let’s just say, her story morphed over time. She started out with one testimony but ended up in court with quite another. When asked point-blank if Trulove was the shooter, she said—probably more than once—that she could not be sure. She never denied it, but she started out saying she couldn’t see the shooter clearly, so she could not identify anyone. Remember it was midnight on a dark street; she was looking down at the street from a second-story window. She could not identify who the shooter was.

Police showed her a photo array. The normal protocol for this sort of thing is to show the witness five or more photos of people the witness does not know and to mix into this array a photo of the suspect. In the case of Lualemaga, police showed her only photos of people she knew—and Trulove. When they asked her who the shooter was, she still would not name Trulove.

But time had a way of changing her mind. She gradually changed from saying she couldn’t tell who it was to maybe it was Trulove. Then it changed to it could have been Trulove. Then she said she thought it probably was Trulove. Finally, it was Trulove. Suddenly, she was sure and willing to testify. What changed?

Her circumstances.

Lualemaga lived in that housing project in a grubby two-bedroom apartment she shared with seven other people. The neighborhood was in a high-crime area; gunshots at midnight were not all that rare. The police reported that Priscilla Lualemaga was reluctant about testifying against Trulove because she was afraid he would come after her. There is no evidence Trulove was stalking her or wanted to hurt her, and he denies doing anything to intimidate her at all. But the officers were adamant: unless they could offer Lualemaga protection, she might not testify. They needed her testimony because, as unreliable as eyewitness testimony can be, they had no forensics and no ballistics and no other evidence connecting Trulove to the murder of Kuka.

Kamala’s DA office then authorized the payment of what amounted to more than $60,000 over a period of time that paid for a nicer, bigger, safer apartment for Lualemaga and her family. The taxpayers of the city of San Francisco would foot the bill for their living expenses from June 1, 2009 to April 30, 2011 to make sure Lualemaga would feel safe enough to testify. But to get the nicer apartment, Lualemaga had to testify she saw Trulove shoot Kuka.

She did.

Lualemaga testified against him; Trulove got sentenced and then convicted. He got 50 years to life on a case that revolved around the testimony of one frightened woman who was living in a nice new apartment courtesy of the police. No motive, no other witnesses (although many people were on the street). No ballistics.

In an interview, Trulove said that on the day he was convicted, Kamala was in the courtroom. According to Trulove, he knew he was being framed and she knew it too. He could tell because she was “smirking” as they hauled him off to prison. Of course, smirks, hostile grins, and inappropriate laughter are Kamala trademarks.

Trulove is out today and recipient of a multimillion dollar settlement for wrongful conviction. Here is a long interview of him on The Breakfast Club.

His freedom came in an incredible series of miracles. In a way, he was saved by his weird last name. He had a neck tattoo of his mom’s name: Cheryl Trulove.

Trulove went to prison. He was in a 12-bunk prison cell when a new guy arrived to his cell and noticed his neck tattoo. (I can’t find the name of this “new guy” so I’ll call him “New Guy.”) New Guy not only recognized the unusual name, he said that was there that very night when police were trying to coerce a witness to identify Jamal Trulove as the shooter of Seu Kuka. New Guy knew the neighborhood, but he did not know Jamal Trulove. He said he observed cops trying to get some woman to say that she saw Trulove shoot Kuka. New Guy was so disturbed by this blatant bullying and witness intimidation that he filed a police report! The report claimed that New Guy overheard police officers trying to force a woman in her apartment to say she saw something that she was not prepared to say she saw. In fact, she kept saying she didn’t see what they told her she had seen! The police report filed by New Guy also indicated that Lualemaga was uncomfortable saying she saw Trulove fire the gun, because she absolutely did not witness that. New Guy’s police report was filed right after the shooting, but at Trulove’s court case, the judge was not allowed to see it. Trulove’s lawyers never got to see it, either—Trulove learned about this report in prison! And when he tried to find a copy of New Guy’s police report alleging witness intimidation, it had mysteriously gone missing. It got lost in the Kamala Harris Bermuda Triangle—no trace of it. (Lot of exculpatory evidence goes missing when Kamala is in charge.) Things went badly for New Guy, too; he was accused of lying.

Trulove didn’t give up. He never backed down on his claims that he was innocent. Years passed, but finally his family found a heroic appellate attorney, Marc Zilversmit, who was able to get the case reopened. And, lo and behold, New Guy’s “missing” police report was located.  New Guy had graduated from liar to witness for the defense.

Trulove’s family hired two more smart new attorneys, Alex Reisman and Kate Chatfield. They used autopsy photographs of Kuka in order to fully exonerate Trulove. Results of the autopsy (never presented at court) proved Trulove could not have committed the crime. Ballistics evidence was studied; it not only did not implicate Trulove, it exonerated him. Also reconstructing the crime proved that Lualemaga was right; she might well have heard the gunfire but she would not have been able to see the shooter clearly.

As these two new attorneys dug through the paperwork on the Trulove case, they noticed that many of the police notes and reports were written in pencil. Trulove said that was so that they could erase uncomfortable information as they “constructed” their cases. Multiple police officers were interviewed, but their stories contradicted each other. It was as if Reisman and Chatfield pulled the right thread and the whole case fell apart.

When Reisman and Chatfield brought notes to the judge about the case, they advised the judge to hold the papers up to the light. In that way, his Honor could see by the indentations what information got erased. Not only could the judge see selective omissions in the police notes, it proved beyond all doubt that the somebody had been doctoring up the evidence.

Sadly, our justice system is glacially slow. It took six years for Trulove’s appeals to finally spring open the prison doors. Trulove was granted a second trial in 2015. The court found that he indeed had been framed and established proof of that beyond a reasonable doubt. Trulove got nothing but his freedom for that miscarriage of justice. He filed another lawsuit in 2015, and, for six long years in a prison cell, a federal civil jury awarded Trulove with $10M for the frame job and, in 2018, the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco settled with Trulove and he walked away with a total $13.1M for his wrongful arrest and conviction.

Kamala’s DA office created this mess, but the taxpayers picked up the tab.

But DA Kamala Harris got what she wanted. Back in 2010—as Trulove sat in prison—Barack Obama praised Kamala Harris to the skies for her “tough-on-crime” stance and her stellar character. But even with the endorsement of the then-president, Kamala still barely won the office of AG against Steve Cooley. While Trulove sat in prison, Kamala had moved on to the Senate and from there, in 2016, threw her hat into the ring as a Presidential primary contender for the Democrat party (she lost but she came roaring back in 2020 as Biden’s Vice President). Not bad for a political newbie.

During that same time period as Kamala was ramping up her political career, Trulove witnessed a murder (hist first day), did time in the notorious San Quentin prison, and got stabbed in the stomach. He also felt the despair and depression of the wrongfully imprisoned and missed major milestones in the lives of his four young children. His once blossoming career in music was ruined.

Trulove focused on one thing: getting free. As he pushed to get an appeal and get exculpatory evidence admitted, he kept seeing one name turn up on the paperwork rejecting him or setting him back: Kamala Harris.

Even Politifact, watchdog for the mainstream media, could not do any better than to give the claim a “half-true” reading when Facebook reported, “An appellate court found Kamala Harris and police took part in framing a prosecuting a man for a murder he didn’t commit, paying a key witness.” Since Politifact does clean-up for Democrats, you have to look at what part they deemed made this story mendacious. (Very often, the mainstream media fact-checkers rule a story a lie or half-truth based on some tiny minor detail that’s inaccurate, like when they said Biden didn’t eulogize a Grand Wizard of the KKK while he was sitting Vice President. Biden did eulogize Senator Byrd in 2010 and Byrd had been a very high-ranking official in the KKK, but his title was not Grand Wizard. So the fact-checkers then claim that statement is a blatant lie when it’s 99% true and only one minor detail is wrong.) The part of the story Politifact found to be false was that DA Kamala Harris did not prosecute the case herself. That’s absolutely true, Kamala was DA and DAs usually don’t do the daily grind in the court room. Somebody who worked for her was the actual court-room prosecutor. Politifact also said that the lawsuit filed by Trulove about framing him for murder did not name Kamala Harris. Again, true. She likely did not tamper with any evidence at all herself, but her office allowed such things to go on.

It was Kamala’s DA office that oversaw this travestiy and, contrary to Democrat beliefs, when you’re large and in charge, you’re the one responsible. Why do we have a DA if she’s not responsible for what her underlings do? We could just get a big cardboard cutout and call it the DA if the DA is not responsible for sending innocent men to prison.

Right after the trial, then-DA Kamala Harris heaped praise on Priscilla Lualemaga for being brave when, in fact, she had been bullied into saying something she did not want to say and got paid off with a nice new apartment. (It didn’t last; once Lualemaga testified, she had to move out.)

This isn’t the only case where Harris was accused of prosecuting Black men with false evidence and/or withholding exculpatory evidence that would have granted such defendants freedom. In fact, her record indicates that she often kept non-violent prisoners locked up even when the California supreme court ordered such offenders to be released. This does not quite mesh with Kamala’s current image as a progressive who favors no-cash bail and non-prosecution of Black Lives Matter rioters. But if there is one thing that is true about Kamala Harris it is that she is very flexible. She is whoever and whatever will gain her the most power in that one moment. At the time a guy named Kuka got shot at a housing project, she needed to ramp up her conviction rate. Using Jamal Trulove to meet that goal came naturally to her. I doubt she gave it a second thought.

His story is so monumental, it appears on the National Registry of Exonerations.

Trulove, now a free man, has said that he did not follow politics much but he did make a wry observation. He noted that when it’s an election year, more people seem to go to jail.

And in the case of Kamala Harris, more Black people ….