A man who was wrongly convicted of murder in San Francisco when Vice President Kamala Harris was serving as the city’s district attorney, and who later received more than $13 million in a settlement after he was acquitted following six years in prison endorsed former President Donald Trump in his bid for the White House in 2024.
Jamal Trulove endorsed Trump in a video posted to YouTube on July 28, explaining that he previously supported the Biden-Harris ticket during the 2020 election in a bid to preserve his entertainment career.
After Harris announced her candidacy, Trulove (pictured above) explained, “I started losing a lot of support.”
“Executive producers detaching, contracts dissolving,” he explained. “The movement that I wanted to have, to ultimately tell my story, vanished.”
In a bid to maintain his career, which involves film and music production in Los Angeles, Trulove explained he resolved to endorse the Biden-Harris ticket.
“I told the world I’m gonna put my differences aside with Kamala Harris and I’m gonna vote with Joe Biden,” he explained.
Reflecting on his decision in the video, Trulove stated, “I never liked Joe Biden because of the ’94 crime bill.”
President Joe Biden assembled the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, otherwise known as the 1994 Crime Bill, with the support of former President Bill Clinton.
When it passed, it was the largest crime bill in the United States’ history, and one of its accomplishments was providing states with financial incentives if they require prisoners to complete at least 85 percent of their sentences behind bars.
Trulove said concerns over his career will not stop him from sharing his views about Harris in 2024.
“And if you’re wondering if I’m going to be voting for Kamala Laugh-a-Lot Harris, f*** no,” he said.
Trulove confirmed, “I’m going with Donald Trump, where’s my red hat at?”
Trulove said, “I know this is an unpopular opinion and I’m going to get a lot of backlash, but at the end of the day it’s my story and I want to tell it.”
Trulove also shared the video in a post to Instagram, where he wrote he was unconcerned about losing work due to his refusal to support Harris, who he claimed was behind the effort that saw him “framed for murder and spending 6+ years in prison.”
He was wrongly convicted of murder in 2008. The prosecutor working under Harris heavily relied on testimony from one individual who claimed to witness Trulove murdering another man, but was watching the street from her second-story window from a significant distance.
Trulove’s defense later gained access to evidence withheld during the trial, which cast that witness’ testimony into doubt. Trulove was freed in 2015, and the next year, he was acquitted. He then secured a $13.1 million settlement from the City of San Francisco for his time in prison.
In response to the claim that Harris delegated his murder case to then-Assistant Attorney Linda Allen and should not be held responsible, Trulove raised Harris’ former position as the district attorney.
“She’s the head of it, she overseen it. She had to, it was a murder case right?” Trulove said.
He added, “At the end of my paperwork it was stamped and sealed the Office of Kamala Harris.”
Harris served as San Francisco’s district attorney from 2003 through 2010.
Allen prosecuted the case against Trulove. She appeared to shoulder the majority of the blame for the wrongful conviction and faced legal complaints over her handling of the case.
Allen reportedly claimed at trial that the witness who testified against Trulove was threatened by his friends or family without “a scintilla of evidence,” according to The Mercury News, which reported the court further admonished, “this yarn was made of whole cloth.”
Liberty University professor Phil Kline, who formerly served as the district attorney of Johnson County, Kansas, and as the Kansas Attorney General, told The Michael Patrick Leahy Show on Tuesday the level of responsibility shared by Harris depends on the circumstances that led to the failure to provide exculpatory evidence to Trulove’s lawyers, which ultimately allowed his wrongful conviction and later acquittal.
Kline explained it was Harris’ responsibility to “train everybody” to comply with the district’s policy, which required providing such evidence to defense attorneys, which included “interacting with law enforcement officers so that they know what they have to provide and what has to be maintained and turned over to the defense.”
The legal expert told Michael Patrick Leahy, the editor-in-chief of The Tennessee Star, that law enforcement officers would have depended on Harris’ experience as a lawyer to know what evidence should have been provided.
“It is the district attorney who is the lawyer, law enforcement officers are not lawyers generally,” said Kline. “They need to be educated as it relates to these types of these things, and generally the district attorney is part of this training.”
Still, Kline maintained, “It is too simple of a conclusion to say her office is at fault,” because it’s unclear whether Harris or Allen “had knowledge of the existence of this information,” or whether the police officers involved also hid the information from the prosecuting attorneys.
Kline nonetheless told Leahy that questions over potential evidence would have “generally” surfaced for Harris or Allen when interviewing officers and preparing the case for trial.
Watch Kline’s full analysis of Harris’ potential involvement in Trulove’s case:
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Tom Pappert is the lead reporter for The Tennessee Star, and also reports for The Pennsylvania Daily Star and The Arizona Sun Times. Follow Tom on X/Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
