Sessions Closed Sterling Case. Odds Are, His Predecessor Would Have, Too.
To Jeff Sessions’s biggest critics, his decision this week not to charge two white police officers in the shooting death of a black man in Louisiana was the realization of their fears of an attorney general who promised a pro-police stance on civil rights matters.
“There is no way to misinterpret the message that Jeff Sessions sent,” Rashad Robinson, the executive director of the civil rights group Color of Change, said. “Black lives do not matter.”
The truth is more complicated.
In declining to prosecute officers in the July death of Alton B. Sterling in Baton Rouge, Mr. Sessions was keeping with — not breaking from — a longstanding pattern. Even under President Barack Obama, the Justice Department rarely prosecuted police officers in deadly shootings, including those that inspired the greatest outrage.
Bringing federal charges in such cases requires proving that an officer intended to violate someone’s civil rights, an exceptionally high legal standard. And the criminal justice system can favor police officers from the moment shots are fired. Officers have wide latitude about when to use deadly force if they perceive a threat, and courts and juries have been hesitant to second-guess their decisions.
“Police officers tend to get the benefit of the doubt,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “African-Americans tend not to get the benefit of the doubt when police officers say they are dangerous or threatening or violent.”
Prosecutors and defense lawyers agree that persuading a jury to convict a police officer is difficult. “They think even if a cop made a mistake, they were just trying to do their job,” said Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor who teaches race relations and the law at Georgetown University Law Center. That predisposition seeps into charging decisions because Justice Department rules require prosecutors to be confident that they will win at trial.
During the Obama administration, the Justice Department declined to prosecute police officers in Pasco, Wash., who chased and shot to death an unarmed man who had been throwing rocks at them. A Seattle officer faced no charges for killing a Native American woodcarver who the police chief later said posed no threat. And, in the case that set off the debate about race and policing, Darren Wilson, an officer in Ferguson, Mo., was cleared in the shooting death of Michael Brown.
The decision in Mr. Sterling’s death was set in motion under the Obama administration. Prosecutors have known for months that it would be extremely difficult to bring charges, particularly because Mr. Sterling had a gun.
source:-https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/us/jeff-sessions-police-shooting-civil-rights.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=4&pgtype=sectionfront
