Midwest Dispatch: Will Klobuchar’s Record as Prosecutor Undermine her Candidacy?

On January 29, just days before the Iowa caucuses, a group of civil rights activists gathered in downtown Minneapolis with a clear message for Democratic presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar: Drop out of the presidential race.

Klobuchar has risen in national polls lately, mostly by pitching herself as a no-nonsense moderate who is alternately tough on Republicans and willing and able to work closely with them to get things done. She projects a folksy vibe that can perhaps be described as a caricature of a loveable Midwestern curmudgeon.

Caricature or not, Klobuchar is becoming increasingly visible as a candidate, especially after The New York Times endorsed both her and Elizabeth Warren on January 19. 

Perhaps this has something to do with the machinations going on behind the scenes in the Democratic National Committee. In recent days, critics on the left have accused DNC leader Tom Perez of trying to stack “standing committees with determined anti-progressives” who will act as super delegates and thus vote for a more mainstream presidential nominee.

Joe Biden’s name rises to the top of that list, of course, but Klobuchar might just be a less tainted, equally on-message option, especially since she has walked the middle road regarding Medicare for All and tuition-free college.

But to some observers, the DNC strategy is creating nothing more than an inner-party tug of war that has little to do with people’s daily lives or even the entrenched disparities and injustices they see around them all the time.

That’s what was at stake in Minneapolis on January 29. Klobuchar was chief prosecutor for Hennepin County, Minnesota’s largest, in the wake of the crackdown on crime ushered in during Bill Clinton’s tenure. In the late 1990s and 2000s, she played the role of hard-nosed prosecutor, sending offenders to jail for everything from graffiti tags to drug deals while also pushing for longer sentences overall.

Now, that record is catching up with her—thanks to growing public concern about disparities within the criminal justice system—including the plight of those who feel they were wrongfully convicted. 

Myron Burrell is one of them. 

Burrell was convicted of murder in 2003 in a high-profile case prosecuted by Klobuchar. The story is heart-wrenching: Eleven-year-old Tyesha Edwards died in 2002 when a stray bullet tore through a wall in her family’s South Minneapolis home. 

On the campaign trail, Klobuchar has pointed to the case as evidence of her ability to get difficult things accomplished. She has also claimed to have been a persistent champion for racial justice.

Burrell, identified in news reports as a gang member, was sentenced to life in prison. He was sixteen years old at the time of the shooting. Burrell, like Edwards, is African-American.  

During a subsequent resentencing (explained here) in 2008, a different judge attempted to add five years to Burrell’s life sentence, as if to say he couldn’t possibly be punished enough. The case’s salient themes—the murder of an innocent child, the epidemic of gun violence impacting young people of color, the ability to lock a teenager away for life—are still rippling through Minneapolis today.

That is partly because many people associated with Burrell’s case allege that he did not kill Edwards. This includes a fellow inmate who has confessed to the crime and says he now must carry “two burdens”—Edwards’s death and Burrell’s imprisonment since he was a teenager, with little hope for release.

Leonard Winborn is Tyesha Edwards’s stepfather. In a recent interview, he also questioned Burrell’s conviction and says he feels his family was “hoodwinked” by city officials eager to put someone behind bars for Edwards’s murder. If Burrell is actually not guilty, then his family has lost a child too, Winborn insists.

Here’s something else worth noting: Frederick Joseph, writing for The Independent, argues that Senator Kamala Harris, a former Democratic presidential hopeful, was run off the campaign trail in part because of her own past as a punishment-minded district attorney. 

Almost as soon as she announced her candidacy in January 2019, videos and articles highlighting Harris’s time as a lead prosecutor in San Francisco surfaced. Footage of her from 2010, where she laughed about wanting to jail parents of truant children, was especially damaging.

Joseph believes that valid questions about Harris’s past experiences, just like those that have arisen about Klobuchar, eventually became part of a troubling narrative, including the tagline “Kamala is a cop” and racist tropes like the untrue charge that she is not really black.

Harris’s campaign was sunk in part by these criticisms, which Joseph thinks were leveled in such a way, from so many sources, that they amount to a coordinated, race-driven attack on her.

Perhaps Klobuchar’s record as a prosecutor is actually worse than Harris’s, as some have argued. Burrell’s conviction was accomplished with zero physical evidence—no gun, no fingerprints, no DNA—and yet he is facing a lifetime spent in a maximum security prison. 

Cases like Burrell’s fulfilled a promise Klobuchar made while first running to be Hennepin County Attorney in 1998—to lock up juvenile offenders in response to heightened fears about urban crime run amok.

So a key question now hangs in the air. Will Klobuchar face the same challenge to her presidential bid as Harris did? So far, she has been able to ride out the controversy surrounding her leadership from a white, centrist distance.