Anti-police leftists take control of Ferguson shooting investigation

Eric Holder’s Justice Department is in Missouri, some 50 strong according to Megyn Kelly, to investigate the shooting of Michael Brown and to decide whether to charge police officer Darren Wilson with civil rights crimes. The investigation and decision is in the hands of the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division.

How much confidence can Americans have in the fairness and objectivity of this unit? The answer, I submit, is little if any.

Christian Adams at PJ Media has been covering the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division for years. PJ Media had to file a lawsuit to obtain the resumes of the lawyers Holder has brought into that group. According to Adams, it turned out that every one of his hires is a left-wing activist, and that some have histories of anti-police activity.

For example, Saeed Mody clerked for the Texas Civil Rights Project, where he assisted the NAACP in suing the Austin Police Department for alleged brutality. As an undergraduate, Mody was co-chair of the campus Palestine Solidarity Committee.

Tona Boyd interned for the ACLU National Racial Justice Project and served as the Racial Justice Chair of the Black Law Students Association at Harvard. As an editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, she wrote an article titled “Confronting Racial Disparity: Legislative Responses to the School-to-Prison Pipeline.”

In that article, Boyd argued that tough law enforcement policies against violent youth should be abandoned because they tend to “cast too wide a net, failing to differentiate between gangs and other group criminal activity, and could exacerbate the problem of disproportionate minority contact.”

Chiraag Bains interned at left-wing Vera Institute of Justice, where he wrote a report criticizing the conditions of confinement at “supermax” prisons for the most dangerous criminals. He also helped organize something called the “Inequality Summer Institute” where he was involved in the Juvenile Rights Advocacy Project, which aims to educate high school students about their rights in interactions with police.

As an undergraduate, Bains interned at the liberal Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, where he co-wrote a guide to assist convicted felons in gaining the right to vote.

You can read more such bios here. If you do, you will surely conclude that Darren Wilson, the officer who shot Michael Brown, is extremely unlikely to get a fair shake from this ideologically driven lot.

But one needn’t rely on the bios of Holder’s cadre of anti-police lawyers to see where things are likely headed in Ferguson. The track record of the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division is proof enough.

Adams notes that “the anti-police biases of lawyers in this unit have resulted in gross prosecutorial misconduct against police officers.” U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt issued a blistering 129-page opinion documenting prosecutorial misconduct by DOJ lawyers who tried to convict New Orleans police officers of civil rights violations. These lawyers, says Adams, are still employed by the Criminal Section at the Civil Rights Division.

Among the abuses committed by Holder’s charges found by Judge Engelhardt was this:

Prosecutors acting with anonymity used social media to circumvent ethical obligations, professional responsibilities, and even to commit violations of the Code of Federal Regulations.”

In fact, DOJ lawyer Karla Dobinski wasn’t content just to post her own anonymous blog entries about the trial. According to Hans Von Spakovsky, she also encouraged other anonymous bloggers who, the judge found, “repeatedly posted vigorous pro-prosecution statements strongly condemning the defendants, their witnesses, and their entire defense.”

To make matters worse, Dobinski was the supervising “taint” attorney assigned to the New Orleans case. (A taint attorney is a government lawyer separate from the prosecution team who is entrusted with searching files and identifying material that their colleagues who are handling the case should not see.)

It seems to me that any investigation of events in Ferguson conducted by Eric Holder’s crew of hand-picked leftists is tainted before it begins.

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