By ERIC TUCKER Associated Press
Washington - Loretta Lynch was
a federal prosecutor in New York City when she encountered an astonishing case
of police brutality: the broomstick sodomy of a Haitian immigrant in a precinct
bathroom.
The 1997 assault on Abner
Louima set off street protests, frayed race relations and led to one of the
most important federal civil rights cases of the past two decades - with Lynch
a key part of the team that prosecuted officers accused in the beating or of
covering it up.
President Barack Obama's
nomination of Lynch to be attorney general comes as the department she would
take over continues to investigate the police shooting of an unarmed black
18-year-old in Ferguson, Mo., and seems partly intended to convey the message
that police misconduct and civil rights will remain a principal focus even
after the departure of Eric Holder.
If confirmed by the Senate,
Lynch would be the first black woman in the job and would follow the first
black attorney general.
Lynch has overseen corruption,
terrorism and gang cases in her years as a federal prosecutor. But it's her
involvement some 15 years ago in the Louima prosecution that gave her
high-profile experience in step with a core priority of the department.
"It is certainly
significant that she has a personal history of involvement in prosecuting
police misconduct," said Samuel Bagenstos, the former No. 2 official in
the department's civil rights division. "Obviously that will be helpful,
and probably suggests that police misconduct cases will continue to be a
priority of the Lynch Justice Department just as they were with the Holder
Justice Department.
Lawyers say Obama likely
selected Lynch, 55, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, on
the strength of a varied career and stature within the department.
"She has spent years in
the trenches as a prosecutor, aggressively fighting terrorism, financial fraud,
cybercrime, all while vigorously defending civil rights," Obama said in
introducing Lynch at the White House ceremony Saturday.
He said her prosecution of the
officers in the Louima case was "one of her proudest achievements."
But there's also no doubt that
selecting someone with civil rights experience could reaffirm the government's
commitment to that cause. That figures to be an especially important signal to
send as community members in Ferguson brace for the real prospect that state
and federal investigations into the shooting death of Michael Brown will close
without criminal charges, outcomes that could disillusion civil rights
activists and community members.
Holder has said he expects his
federal investigation to conclude before he resigns, but Lynch still would
inherit a civil rights probe into the practices of the entire Ferguson Police
Department.
That investigation is one of
roughly 20 that the Justice Department has initiated into troubled police
departments in the past five years, more than twice the number undertaken in
the five years before that. Those cases are part of a broader civil rights push
- challenging strict state voter identification laws and promoting changes in
how federal prosecutors negotiate sentences, among other efforts - likely to
help shape Holder's legacy.
Holder's supporters will expect
Lynch to continue that work, though her experience in two different stints as
U.S. attorney goes well beyond that.
Her office, which encompasses
Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island and Staten Island, won convictions in a thwarted
plot to bomb the city's subway system, successfully prosecuted a New York state
assemblyman caught accepting bribes in a sting operation and, more recently,
filed tax evasion charges against Republican Rep. Michael Grimm. She's also
worked closely with Justice Department leadership by heading a U.S. attorneys
committee that advises Holder on policy.
But it was the case of Louima,
tortured with a broken broomstick on a bathroom floor, that elevated her
profile as a trial attorney. In a Senate questionnaire for the job of U.S.
attorney, she placed the case second - behind only a sexual harassment matter
involving a city councilman - in a list of the most significant cases she
personally handled.
Brooklyn District Attorney
Kenneth Thompson, a trial team member, recalled how Lynch generously gave him -
a more junior prosecutor - the responsibility of delivering opening statements
in the case while she worked to craft the strategy and narrative that would be
presented to the jury.
During the first trial in 1999,
which ended with mixed verdicts, Lynch and the prosecution team hammered the
officers for hiding behind a "blue wall of silence."
"Don't let these
defendants push us back to the day when police officers could beat people with
impunity, and arrest people for no reason and lie about it to cover it
up," she told jurors.
Alan Vinegrad, who succeeded
Lynch as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District and worked alongside her on the
Louima case, recalled her as diligent and thorough prosecutor who made a
compelling final argument to the jury.
"She had to get up and
respond to all the arguments of five different lawyers made over a day about
why all their clients were not guilty of anything," Vinegrad said.
"She had to pretty quickly decide, "OK, what are the important
arguments. How do I respond to them persuasively?"'
Lynch was U.S. attorney from
1999 to 2001, as the Louima case slogged through the courts on appeals and new
trials. She left for private practice before being nominated in 2010, this time
by Obama, to run the office again.
Lynch, who grew up in
Greensboro, N.C., "rode on her father's shoulders to his church, where
students would meet to organize anti-segregation boycotts," Obama said.
"She was inspired by stories about her grandfather, a sharecropper in the
1930s, who helped folks in his community who got in trouble with the law and
had no recourse under the Jim Crow system."
The president said Lynch
"has spent her life fighting for fair and equal justice that is the
foundation of our democracy."
