Sessions defies civil rights image by helping in transgender case
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has dispatched an experienced federal hate crimes lawyer to Iowa to help prosecute a man charged with killing a transgender high school student in 2016, a highly unusual move that officials said was personally initiated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
In taking the step, Sessions, a staunch conservative, is sending a signal that he has made a priority of fighting violence against transgender people individually, even as he has rolled back legal protections for them collectively.
The Justice Department rarely assigns its lawyers to serve as local prosecutors, and only in cases in which they can provide expertise in areas that the government views as significant. By doing so in this instance, Sessions put the weight of the government behind a murder case with overtones of gender identity and sexuality.
Kedarie Johnson, a 16-year-old in Burlington, Iowa, was shot to death in March 2016. Family and friends said he was gay, identified as both male and female and occasionally went by the name Kandicee.
As a senator from Alabama, Sessions had spoken out against same-sex marriage and voted against expanding federal hate crimes laws to protect transgender people, and civil rights groups were livid when President Donald Trump nominated him to be attorney general. They predicted he would reverse policies on discrimination, police abuses and other areas.
In many ways, Sessions has fulfilled those predictions. He declared that the Justice Department no longer considered gay or transgender people to be protected from workplace discrimination and reversed a policy encouraging schools to let transgender students use bathrooms that fit their gender identities. He abandoned objections to voter identification requirements in Texas and signaled that he would not try to force federal oversight on police.
But he has also brought several hate crime cases, including one against a man accused of burning a mosque.