Justice Dept. signals priorities with focus on civil rights cases
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is sending a strong message about its priorities these days.
In just over the past two weeks, it has opened investigations of police in Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis. Federal prosecutors have charged four former Minneapolis police officers with civil rights violations in George Floyd’s death, and accused three men of hate crimes in the death of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia. In both criminal cases, authorities moved forward with federal charges before most of the defendants have gone to state trial.
Attorney General Merrick Garland is making good on his confirmation promise to refocus the department around civil rights after four years of tumult during the Trump administration, when such investigations waned and the focus was on curbing immigration and the Russia probe.
“What we couldn’t get them to do in the case of Eric Garner, Michael Brown in Ferguson, and countless others, we are finally seeing them do,” the Rev. Al Sharpton
said Friday after the charges were announced in Floyd’s death. Former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin has already been convicted of murder and manslaughter charges in state court and is scheduled to be sentenced June 25. The federal case could be insurance against a successful state appeal or a lenient sentence.
Separately, federal officials accused Chauvin in a 2017 case involving Chauvin’s arrest of a 14-year-old boy. Chauvin hit the boy, who is Black, with a flashlight and pinned him to the ground, putting his knee on the boy’s neck and back.
Chauvin’s lawyer, Eric Nelson, has filed a request for a new trial in Floyd’s death, citing a host of reasons, including publicity that was “so pervasive and so prejudicial ... that it amounted to a structural defect in the proceedings.”
The three other officers brought up on civil rights charges, Thomas Lane, J. Kueng and Tou Thao, haven’t been tried yet in state court on charges of aiding and abetting both second-degree murder and manslaughter in the Floyd case.
Usually, federal prosecutors hold off on any charges until local investigations are completed. But when they do, it’s often seen as a safety net against the difficulty of prosecuting law enforcement locally.
In the 1960s, federal authorities successfully prosecuted eight men involved in the 1964 disappearances and murders of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner in Neshoba County, Mississippi, after local authorities said they did not have enough evidence to prosecute anyone. One of the most high-profile uses of the federal statutes came in the 1992 Rodney King case in Los Angeles. Federal authorities charged four law enforcement officers with violating King’s constitutional rights in his videotaped beating. That decision came after a jury in Simi Valley acquitted the officers in the state case, prompting several days of riots in Los Angeles.
Federal officials have also revived pattern or practice investigations, which were rarely used under the Trump administration. They weren’t banned under President Donald Trump, but his attorney general, William Barr, suggested they may have been previously overused.