Civil rights leaders seek more black prosecutors
When grand juries decide not to indict suspects, they rely on information presented by prosecutors.
Following controversial grand jury decisions against indicting police officers responsible for the deaths of unarmed black men in Missouri and New York — and the weeks of protests against police violence — some civil rights leaders are pointing out the need for more black prosecutors.
Their hiring could help mend the growing rift between communities of color and law enforcement agencies, the activists say.
“You can do everything you possibly can as a civil rights lawyer or a defense lawyer,” said former NAACP leader Ben Jealous. “But unless we can recruit more people who think like you as prosecutors, there are entire levers of power that we won’t have access to.”
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is
black and California Attorney General Kamala Harris is the first African American and South Asian to hold the state’s top law enforcement job.
But below them are few black prosecutors — or lawyers, for that matter — at any level.
In California, roughly 3 percent — 11 out of 368 criminal division attorneys in the state Department of Justice — are black. The American Bar Association doesn’t track the demographics of prosecutors, nor do other top legal associations.
Few black prosecutors
Not that Melba Pearson, president of the National Black Prosecutors Association, needs a survey to tell her what she sees every day.
“The reality is that you can go into just about any courthouse and not see a lot of black prosecutors,” said Pearson, a prosecutor in the Miami-Dade state attorney’s office. “And you can’t change the system unless you have a seat at the table.”
There are few African Americans in private practice, either. Even fewer become partners. Nationally, only 3 percent of the attorneys working in private law firms are black.
While the number of Latino and Asian American attorneys in private practice increased over the past five years, the number of black lawyers in private practice dropped, according to a 2014 survey by American Lawyer magazine. Less than 2 percent of the partners at top firms are black, the survey found.
Boosting the number of minority prosecutors could bring different perspectives to the legal system, said Harris. She noted that when women assumed positions of power in the criminal justice system — as police officers, prosecutors and judges — “we shifted our perspective around who the righteous victim was” in crimes like rape and domestic violence.
“When more women were involved in a position of authority we started saying, ‘Hey, the crime against her is not about what a king does in his castle is his business. She’s walking around with a black eye and a fat lip. That’s an assault,’ ” Harris said.
‘Serial injustices’
Jealous’ call for more black prosecutors echoes a civil rights movement pitch by Thelton Henderson, a longtime federal judge in California and the first black attorney at the U.S. Justice Department. Henderson took a job as assistant dean at Stanford Law School when he learned the school graduated its first black attorney in 1968. Thanks to his recruitment efforts, 20 percent of its graduates were people of color by 1976, and Henderson’s program was emulated nationwide.
After the lack of indictments in the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner — cases presented to grand juries by white prosecutors — Henderson’s message still resonates, according to Jealous.
“For this generation of young people who are so outraged by these serial injustices that we have been subjected to, there should really be a call for as many of them as possible to go into law enforcement — and specifically to become prosecutors,” said Jealous, who now works to bring black and Latino employees into the tech world as a venture capitalist with Kapor Capital and the Kapor Center for Social Impact.
Having more black prosecutors would be helpful, “but it doesn’t solve the problem” throughout the criminal justice system, said Pamela Meanes, president of the National Bar Association, the nation’s oldest and largest national network of predominantly African American attorneys and judges. “You can’t just assume that if you have a black prosecutor there that that individual will understand and relate to the community,” Meanes said.
Among other changes, Meanes wants independent prosecutors to handle police misconduct cases. She would like to redefine what constitutes the use of force by police, and would like law enforcement officers to wear body cameras and receive more diversity training.
“The issue of police brutality has more to do with the color of blue than the color of black and white,” Meanes said. “It’s just that when black and white is infused in it, it makes the situation worse.”
Trying to get out of debt
Some black law students and practicing attorneys say financial considerations steer them toward private practice. Students who graduated from UC Berkeley’s law school last year carried an average of $141,358 in debt after they got their diploma. Entry-level prosecutor jobs often pay half that.
“When you leave law school — unless you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, which most of us aren’t — you come out with a lot of debt,” Meanes said. “Working for the government is not the first job you go after. People go after jobs where they can make a living, feed their families and pay their loans back.”
Salah Hawkins, one of 11 African Americans in his thirdyear class of 260 at UC Berkeley School of Law, wrestles with the desire to change a legal system that he said is biased against people of color. But he also wants to lift his family out of poverty.
After graduation, Hawkins has a job lined up at a New York law firm for one year, and a prestigious clerkship with a federal district judge in New York for the year after that. After that, he’s mulling how to best serve his community. He was raised by his grandmother in a poor part of Wilmington, Del., as his mother battled drug problems. When he graduates, he will likely have more than $100,000 of education-related debt.
“A lot of students like me face a decision to help their families or to help their communities,” he said. “No matter what they choose, we should respect their decision.”
Harris understands the dilemma. Her solution: “Become a prosecutor for five years, get a bunch of trial experience. You will be very attractive to a law firm if you want to make money later.”