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A Justice Department prosecutor defied his superiors by testifying at a U.S. Civil Rights Commission hearing Friday, where he leveled an explosive allegation: top officials in the department gutted a voter intimidation case against a fringe African American militant group because the suspects were black and their alleged victims were white.
The prosecutor, Christopher Coates, also said the downgrading of the case against the New Black Panther Party was evidence of a Justice Department culture which discouraged “race neutral” enforcement of civil rights laws, frowned on prosecuting minority perpetrators and folded under pressure from black and Latino rights groups. After President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder took office, the culture intensified, Coates told the panel, ultimately leading to his departure as chief of the voting rights section early this year....
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0910/42676.html#ixzz10UAAcTWKCoates said the Justice Department’s efforts to silence him threatened to obscure what he called “the hostile atmosphere that has existed within [Justice’s Civil Rights] Division for a long time against race-neutral enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.”
“I did not lightly decide to comply with your subpoena in contradiction to the DOJ’s directives not to testify,” Coates said. “If incorrect representations are going to successfully thwart inquiry into the systemic problems regarding race-neutral enforcement of the Voting Rights Act by the Civil Rights Division, problems that were manifested....in the New Black Panther Party case that end is not going to be furthered or accomplished by my sitting idly or silently by at the direction of my supervisors while incorrect information is provided.
“I do not believe that I am professionally, ethically, legally, or morally bound to allow such a result to occur,” Coates said.
The Justice Department has said it advised Coates not to testify to avoid chilling the free-flowing exchange of information among department attorneys as cases are considered and prosecution decisions are made....
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“A Voting Section career attorney informed me that he was opposed to bringing voting rights cases against African American defendants…until we reached the day when the socio-economic status of blacks in Mississippi was the same as the socio-economic status of whites living there,” he said. “Of course, there’s nothing in the statutory language of the VRA that indicates DOJ lawyers can decide not to enforce the race-neutral prohibitions in the Act against racial discrimination….until socio-economic parity is achieved between blacks and whites in the jurisdiction in which the cases arise.”
Coates said a senior Civil Rights Division official, Loretta King also ordered him to stop asking job Justice Department job candidates if they would be willing to work on cases against minorities who violated equal-protection laws as well as cases filed against whites.
“She did not ask me. She told me. She said, ‘You will not ask that question again,’” Coates said.
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