Adrian Kamada: Getting to Know This Candidate for District Attorney

Adrian Kamada

Since Humboldt County District Attorney Maggie Fleming (who came into office eight years ago) has chosen not to run for reelection, three candidates have stepped into contention for her position–Deputy District Attorney Stacey Eads, defense attorney Michael Acosta, and Adrian Kamada, currently from the Public Defender’s Office, though formerly, he also worked at the District Attorney’s Office. We interviewed both Eads and Kamada (Acosta has not responded to our request for an interview nor has he posted a candidate page to the best of our knowledge) and– to boil the two candidates down to one word descriptions of their platforms–Eads is running on her experience and Kamada is running on innovation.

We posted our article on Eads earlier and below, we’ll introduce Kamada.

Like Eads, Kamada grew up in Humboldt County and loves it. He told us, “My family lives here. I grew up here in this beautiful place…We do have a unique, awesome culture… .” Kamada noted though that he recognizes that there are issues with crime.  He told us,  “People always pointing at the crime pains me, but it is a reality and we need to start addressing it in a more effective way.” 

He then argued that the current DA’s Office isn’t addressing crime in the most streamlined way, stating, “Everything I am aimed at doing is trying to establish innovation…We need to leave this mentality that ‘this is the way things are done’ and use the new ways, because we have a lot of tools.”

Humboldt County Deputy District Attorney Adrian Kamada [Photo from the Department of Fish and Wildlife]

Kamada said, “I was immediately hired by the County as a Deputy Public Defender, an important step in gaining perspective.”

He said that one of the problems he observed at the DA’s Office was that “the office…wasted a tremendous amount of resources…[They were] not being able to make decisions on cases, and wasn’t forthright with counsel.” He stated that prosecutors were “basically taught to almost play like a game of chicken” with defense. This, he argued, wasted time–the court’s time and officers’ time. He described a case where a developmentally delayed person was charged with throwing a brick and lighting a backpack on fire. “We’re taking four cops off the streets of Arcata and Eureka to sit in the courtroom four different times before the [Preliminary] Hearing happens,” he said.

A lot of problem occurred, he claimed because of those in the office “not being able to make a decision early. They dragged the case along through the system. A lot of these problems [with the case] were obvious from the start.”

He related the story of a Sergeant he had talked to in the Courthouse as a case kept being continued. “[The] Sgt was there for her 15th time for one case,” he said. “The [victim] had showed up for the first 6 times [but had eventually stopped coming].

Kamada explained, “That is 15 times that officer was taken off the streets or if it was her day off was being paid to sit around in the courtroom for four hours.”

He argued that a better use of everyone’s time would be to take “low level, first time offenders and try to steer them away from the criminal justice system.” He mentioned several options such as restorative justice to victims and community service work. “Make sure the victim is brought into the decision making system,” he argued, and make the calls that enable plea deals early “rather than having to do a fire sale a year later.”

Kamada wants to expand first-time offender, low-level diversion programs. He said he thinks that possession of stolen property “is usually related to mental health and drug use.” He is eager to expand the community court model to deal with these sorts of situation. One solution he said is to have the defendant do community service work which improves the community. Kamada says that he would like to have that kind of program link to services that will help the defendant stay on track.

“Let’s look to meaningful alternatives [to jail,]” he argued. He noted a number of successful models including Yurok Tribal court which he says has more resources to monitor defendants. He wants to partner with them. “We should be utilizing that resource,” he urged. “At the end of the day the defendants are being held more accountable. It clears out the system and there is more accountability.”

He said that the “starting point for increasing public safety is to “focus on homicides and gun violence.”

He explained that in low level crime frequently “we’re not dealing with a lot of “bad” people. Mostly [the defendants have] mental health and drug issues.” 

Kamada argued that the “faster and quicker we are able to get those serious and violent felonies through the system, the more we’ll see deterrence.” He noted, “The more cases that we can make decisions on earlier, the less court time were going to take and the less we’ll take police off the street.”

Besides streamlining the process, Kamada says he wants to change the way the DA’s Office operates in several key ways.

• He wants to build a database about crime. “There isn’t any data driven policies,” he argued. “If we have people enter the data–demographics, locations–that will give us the numbers to help us shape our policies.”
• He says he wants to be more transparent with the public by having at least a few sentences on each case on the DA’s website. “I would update with a sentence or two on what happened and a link to the prosecutor that handles that case,” he told us.
• He said he wants an active Facebook page. “It goes to accountability,” he explained. There, he said, would be the results of all trials. “Since the fall of last year the DA’s office has lost a stunning amount of trials including four acquittals in a row,” he claimed. He argued that the results of the trials should be clearly communicated to the community. “[The DA’s Office] should put out press releases [at least a few sentences] on every single trial,” he told us.
• He urged putting together “a private public partnership by connecting to other civil law firms to help us prosecute certain kinds of cases” like price gouging for gas.

Kamada said that thinking creatively and working hard had helped him win some of his highest profile cases. He mentioned the case of “two young men who were poaching up Hwy 36 using a big light to get deer to stop. An officer tried to stop them. They took off and the officer started following them.” Shots were fired by the suspect who then fled the scene.

Kamada said that this “required a lot of investigation.” He needed to coordinate evidence that had been gathered from not only from multiple officers and deputies from different agencies but had been gathered over time during a manhunt for one of the defendants. “Putting all of these pieces together took a lot of effort,” he said. He said that building a strong case using cell phone information led to the driver, who had been adamant that he wouldn’t testify against his friend, being willing to testify against the shooter in order to avoid a longer sentence for himself.

“One of the listed reasons I was nominated for Prosecutor of the year,” Kamada told us, was his innovative way of prosecuting defendants for “the systematic theft of succulents–normally this would be a low level crime resulting in a slap on the wrist. He said he went after the defendants with a little known legal charge that allowed for stiffer penalties “where a misdemeanor would not have sufficient deterrence.”

He said he is particularly proud because “one of the Sheriff’s deputies made me a custom belt buckle with redwood trees etc, because of that…Because it is a unique crime, it got a lot of national and even international attention.”

Two high profile cases Kamada prosecuted connected to Southern Humboldt were the Zachary Harrison murder trial and the Eric Lively murder trial.

He noted, “In the Harrison case especially, the defense argued reasonable doubt existed because the witnesses of Southern Humboldt were unreliable, and part of an outlaw culture essentially.”

He told us, “On rebuttal, I was quickly able to show that myth was not true–I listed all of the Southern Humboldt citizens that had willingly testified, and assisted law enforcement’s investigation. How can that perception be true, when all of these citizens are here?”

Kamada told us, “Ultimately, what I saw in those Southern Humboldt cases were citizens wanting to be engaged with authorities in bringing justice. The witnesses came forward and reported what they observed, even when sometimes they felt that they were not being heard because of their connection to the cannabis industry.”

Kamada said he wanted to work to give the citizens of rural Humboldt County faith in the DA’s Office. “Building trust with all communities is essential to effective investigations, and in turn, successful prosecutions,” he explained. “Building that trust is a central component of my platform.”

Earlier stories connected to the Humboldt County District Attorney race:

• A Deep Look at Candidate for Humboldt County DA, Stacey Eads
• District Attorney Candidates Leave Unscathed After Matchup in the Mattole