Panther Case Dismissal Needs Explanation

It has not been easy to find main-stream media stories that explain why Attorney General Eric Holder has failed to explain adequately why the Justice Department under his direction dropped a slam-dunk voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party.

The story has been around for days in programs on Fox News and on several generally right of center web sites. The story, appalling as it is, has never made it to the pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post or aired on any of the three major broadcasts network news programs.

Not even the fact that the U.S. Civil Rights Commission scheduled a hearing on the case for Tuesday was worthy of coverage.

Over the weekend, however, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Kevin Ferris wrote about the story and asked many of the same questions news outlets on the right had been asking for days.

More will come out in the days ahead. For now, these are the facts according to Ferris.

At issue are events that occurred Election Day 2008 in Philadelphia.

According to Ferris this is how a Justice Department complaint filed in January 2009 described those events:

“Samir Shabazz, head of the Philadelphia chapter of the New Black Panther Party, and party member Jerry Jackson were “deployed” in front of a Fairmount Avenue polling place in “military style uniforms.”

Shabazz brandished a nightstick. He “pointed the weapon at individuals, menacingly tapped it [in] his other hand, or menacingly tapped it elsewhere.” Both Shabazz and Jackson leveled “racial threats and racial insults at both black and white individuals,” and they “made menacing and intimidating gestures, statements, and movements directed at individuals who were present to aid voters.”

Ferris explained that since neither the two men, the party, or the national chairman of the New Black Panther Party named in the complaint responded to the accusations, the case was all but won.

However, in May 2009, the Justice Department dropped claims against all but Shabazz, who was merely ordered not to take a weapon to a Philadelphia polling place through 2012.

Holder has refused to explain adequately the Justice Department’s decision to drop the case. “His department’s answers to inquiries have been incomplete and unsatisfactory. Career attorneys involved in the case have not been available for questioning, even when subpoenaed,” Ferris said in his column.

Now, J. Christian Adams, who was a Justice Department voting-rights lawyer until he resigned last month, is scheduled to testify before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on Tuesday.

This comes after Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez told the commission in May that the case has been re-reviewed and the evidence deemed insufficient to proceed.

“That claim is false,” Adams, the former Justice lawyer, wrote in the Washington Times last month. “If the actions in Philadelphia do not constitute voter intimidation, it is hard to imagine what would, short of an actual outbreak of violence at the polls.”

Adams wrote that the dismissal of the case “was motivated by a lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law.” As for the re-review, “the lawyers who ordered the dismissal … did not even read the internal Justice Department memorandums supporting the case and investigation.”

What’s “most disturbing,” Adams wrote, is “the open and pervasive hostility within the Justice Department to bringing civil rights cases against nonwhite defendants on behalf of white victims. Equal enforcement of justice is not a priority of this administration. Open contempt is voiced for these types of cases.

“Some of my coworkers,” Adams continued, “argued that the law should not be used against black wrongdoers because of the long history of slavery and segregation. … Incredibly, after the case was dismissed, instructions were given that no more cases against racial minorities like the Black Panther case would be brought by the [Justice Department's] Voting Section,” Adams said.

Ferris added that in a follow-up article for the website Pajamas Media on Monday, Adams cited other cases, in Texas and Connecticut, showing the department’s “hostility toward race-neutral enforcement of the civil rights laws.”

The Justice Department fired back last week, saying in a statement that ” … it is regrettable when a former department attorney distorts the facts and makes baseless allegations to promote his or her agenda.”

The incident in question was videotaped and a lawyer was a witness to the incident.

Let’s see what the U.S. Civil Rights Commission finds. The law must apply to all equally. The hearing is worthy of close scrutiny by the media — all of it.

The Americano/Agencies