On April 24, 2007, Kamala Harris testified before Congress in support of the John R. Justice Prosecutors and Defenders Incentive Act of 2007. The bill, which was introduced that year but never passed the upper chamber, would have created a student loan repayment program for state and local prosecutors, and Harris, then the district attorney of San Francisco, argued it would draw top legal talent to offices like hers.
n a written statement to the House Judiciary Committee, she described how debt-addled prosecutors often decamp to the private sector a few years into the job, lured by the prospect of higher pay that could be used to pay off law school debt. That dynamic had left many district attorneys’ offices short-staffed, she said, forcing them to put rookie attorneys on complex cases.
“There are numerous criminal cases that are particularly difficult because of the dynamics involved,” Harris wrote. “To name just a few—child abuse, elder neglect, domestic violence, identity theft and public corruption. The stakes are simply too high to allow any attorney other than experienced prosecutors to handle these matters.”
By repaying the loans of prosecutors and public defenders, Harris argued, the bill, which had been introduced with bipartisan support, would provide an incentive for lawyers to enter public service, or at least diminish the incentive to leave it.
The statement was simple and pragmatic. But Harris wasn’t the first person to make it.
Virtually her entire testimony about the bill was taken from that of another district attorney, Paul Logli of Winnebago County, Illinois, who had testified in support of the legislation two months earlier before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Both statements cite the same surveys, use the same language, and make the same points in the same order, with a paragraph added here or there. They even contain the same typos, such as missing punctuation or mistaken plurals. One error—a “who” that should have been a “whom”—was corrected in Harris’s transposition.