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Actor and activist Jamal Trulove, best known for starring in Bruce Willis' DeadLock, recently opened up about his wrongful murder conviction (from 2010). During his Monday, August 12, 2024, appearance on The Art of Dialogue podcast, the actor elaborated on the moment the jury announced his verdict and he locked eyes with Harris, stating:
"I seen Kamala Harris, you know, we locked eyes. There's this one time and she, and she laughed. She literally just like kind of bust out laughing almost as in if she was pointing at him like, ha ha ha ha. That's how I felt though."
He continued:
"She didn't point, she didn't point, but that's how I felt when she was laughing at the verdict coming down."
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Trulove is an independent filmmaker, activist, and philanthropist from San Francisco. He graduated with a degree in black psychology from San Francisco State University. A father of four, Jamal Trulove currently juggles his time between Los Angeles and San Francisco, working as a producer on several projects. This includes a docu-series about his wrongful conviction and similar stories within the American justice system.
Growing up in the Sunnydale housing projects, Hollywood seemed like a dream for him until he was cast in the acclaimed film The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019). According to his LinkedIn profile, he also appeared in the VH1 reality TV series Love New York 2 (2007).
In 2014, a jury overturned Jamal Trulove's conviction for the murder of his friend Seu Kuka, citing prosecutorial misconduct
Per the University of Michigan’s National Registry of Exoneration, Jamal Trulove's friend Seu Kuka was fatally shot nine times at a public housing project in SF in 2007. A year later, cops arrested the actor after running his ID in an unrelated incident and accused him of the crime.
Jamal, who had no criminal history, initially believed he would be released within 72 hours (the maximum time cops can hold someone without charging them with a crime), as he was innocent. However, law enforcement officers worked to frame him.
According to a 2019 report by VICE, of the two dozen people who saw Kuka die, only one, Priscilla Lualemaga, agreed to talk to the cops. Even then, she failed to pick out the actor out of a series of photos and identified someone else (Jamal's brother) by name. A couple of days later, Lualemaga was shown another set of photos, and she noted that Trulove looked like the guy who shot Kuka.
Per the National Registry, by the time the DeadLock star was on trial, Lualemaga claimed she was 100% sure he was the shooter. In his 2019 essay for the Huffpost, Jamal Trulove wrote:
"In order to get this woman to testify against me, authorities would move her and give her $63,000 for all housing and food costs for years. This was more than she had ever made in her life. They also moved her sister, too, just to sweeten the pot."
During his interview with The Art of Dialogue, Jamal Trulove explained that everyone in his community knew of Kamala Harris, who was the District Attorney of San Francisco at the time. He hoped this shared racial background would mean a fair trial for him. He explained on the podcast:
"People in the projects knew who she was because she was a black district attorney. And we thought that we had a black district attorney in office, right? And who we perceive to be black, right?"
However, it turned out that there was a vast dissonance between the image of Harris as a progressive prosecutor and how he was perceived within his community. Jamal Trulove, in a 2019 discussion with VICE, elaborated:
"When somebody dies in the hood, everybody feels like they’re involved... When someone gets killed, you can plan on getting jacked up by the police regularly."
Per VICE, in 2007, when Kamala Harris was the DA, the city's homicide rate was the highest in 14 years, and in almost 3/4th of the cases, no suspect was arrested. Despite facing no serious opposition (and being reelected), she needed more cases to play for the statewide or national office in 2010.
Jamal was convicted of murder in the first degree and sentenced to 50 years to life in prison in 2010. Harris was present during both his verdict and sentence hearings. He served a total of six years. Describing his time in prison, he wrote (HuffPost essay):
"I was unlucky because this was a time when California’s prisons were dangerously overcrowded. I was unlucky when I saw people getting killed in prison. I was unlucky when I was sliced because I did not know to give up my bunk to a gang member. I was unlucky when I missed my children’s birthdays, and Christmases, and Halloween, and their first days of school."
In his essay, Jamal Trulove explained that his family hired Marc Zilversmit, an appellate attorney, who tracked down other witnesses who testified in favor of the actor, reopening the investigation. An appeal made in 2013 downgraded his sentence. But it wasn't until 2014 that the appellate court found prosecutorial misconduct and disqualified the conviction, ordering a retrial.
In the new trial, it was revealed that the prosecution claimed Lualemaga faced threats against her life without evidence to prove it. Following Jamal Trulove's conviction in 2010, Kamala Harris praised the witness' bravery in testifying. A 2019 article by AP reported that detectives showed Lualemaga a single photo of the actor rather than presenting her with photos of other people as part of the line-up.
Additionally, in his essay for HuffPost, Jamal revealed that detectives asked a witness several times if she was sure it wasn't Trulove. During the trial, police claimed tapes of the interview were lost as the recorder malfunctioned. Later, Trulove's attorney found the man (who was imprisoned) who had seen the interview. He added:
"Police hid evidence. Their stories contradicted each other. They wrote notes in police files in pencil so that exculpatory notes could be erased. But I was lucky that the master file was brought to court and the pages could be held up to the light. The jury could then see what the erased notes said."
Jamal Trulove was acquitted in 2015, and he sued the state for wrongful conviction. Per the Los Angeles Times in a 2019 article, Jamal Trulove received $13.1 million in settlement from the city of San Francisco after a jury found cops fabricated evidence and withheld information that could prove his innocence.
Kamala Harris has not publicly reacted to the development.
