Letter Raises Concerns About DOJ's Civil Rights Enforcement Record
Feature Story by Tyler Lewis - 11/28/2005
The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice "has failed to pursue race and gender based discrimination cases aggressively," according to the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (Lawyers Committee).These and other issues were described in an October 5 letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee chair and ranking Member, which urged the Senate to "raise concerns" about the Division during the confirmation hearings of Wan J. Kim to the position of Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, the most important civil rights position in the federal government.
The Division's workload has decreased significantly and signals a lack of interest in civil rights enforcement, the Lawyers Committee said, citing a drop in prosecutions of civil rights violations, down to 51 in 2003 from 83 in 2000.
The Lawyers Committee said that the Voting Section of the Division has not filed any cases under the Voting Rights Act other than language minority cases since 2001.
The Lawyers Committee's letter referred to an article in the September/October issue of Legal Affairs magazine by former high-ranking Division attorney, William R. Yeomans. Yeomans, a Division attorney for 24 years, said that "declining morale and talent drain have contributed to a decline in the Division's enforcement activity."
Under previous administrations, major decisions were discussed "extensively" by political appointees and career attorneys, according to Yeomans. That situation began to change during the switch from the Clinton to the Bush administrations, Yeomans wrote, "Decisions increasingly were made in isolation from career attorneys and were communicated as orders. Attorneys who sought to engage in discussion or propose alternative approaches were viewed as disloyal and suffered the consequences."
Nearly 20 percent of the Division's career attorneys left in 2005, according to a November 13 Washington Post article. The Lawyers Committee letter said that the loss of valued career attorneys, as well as the "drastic" changes in Division hiring procedures that Yeomans described, were "troubling" because they have "contributed to a clear perception of the politicization of the Division."
Personnel policies have been retooled, Yeomans wrote, to "replace [career lawyers] with attorneys selected because of ideology." Yeomans took a buyout earlier this year.
Career attorneys in the Division's Appellate Section are spending increasing amounts of time defending deportation orders, which detracts from civil rights enforcement, according to Yeomans, who notes that the Appellate Section only filed six amicus briefs in 2004, a third less than the 22 filed in 1999.
In a more recent example of the disconnect at the Division, the Washington Post reported November 18 that the approval of Georgia's controversial voter I.D. program under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act came about despite a 51-page memo from career attorneys in the Division citing the program's retrogressive effects on minorities.
