The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Trump’s top federal prosecutors are overwhelmingly white men
The nation’s top federal prosecutors have become less diverse under President Donald Trump than under his three predecessors, leaving white men overwhelmingly in charge at a time of national demonstrations over racial inequality and the fairness of the criminal justice system.
The Associated Press analyzed government data from nearly three decades and found that a persistent lack of diversity in the ranks of U.S. attorneys has reached a nadir in the Trump administration.
Eighty-five percent of his Senate-confirmed U.S. attorneys are white men, according to AP’s analysis, compared with 58 percent in Democratic President Barack Obama’s eight years, 73 percent during Republican George W. Bush’s two terms and at most 63 percent under Democrat Bill Clinton.
White men lead 79 of the 93 U.S. attorney’s offices in a country where they make up less than a third of the population. Nine current U.S. attorneys are women. Two are Black, and two Hispanic.
Federal prosecutors can have a profound effect on the criminal justice system and leadership holds an immense sway.
Without a diverse group considering cases, bias can seep unnoticed into charging decisions and sentencing recommendations, undermine federal leadership with state and local law enforcement and chip away at the perceived legitimacy of the justice system.
The enduring imbalance leaves U.S. attorneys looking less like the people they serve, and is in stark contrast to the population of federal prisons, where a disproportionate share of those incarcerated are Black.
“When you take it in the aggregate, it becomes very evident that the department, as a whole, is simply not valuing diversity at its highest ranks of leadership and not making the most well-informed decisions when those voices are absent from the decisionmaking process,” said Kenneth Polite Jr., who served as U.S. attorney in New Orleans during Obama’s second term.
“It would be silly for
anyone to suggest the department couldn’t do better.”
The gap is especially relevant in an era when state and local law enforcement are repeatedly being taken to task over decisions not to prosecute police in the killings of Black people. U.S. prosecutors can serve as a backstop in those scenarios by bringing federal charges.
The Trump administration’s inability to hire top prosecutors who reflect the nation has also deepened mistrust in communities frustrated by the Justice Department’s shift away from investigating police practices and Attorney General William Barr’s dismissal of the idea of systemic racism in law
enforcement.
White House spokesman Judd Deere did not answer questions about the diversity of U.S. attorneys under Trump’s watch, but said in a statement the administration has “worked closely with U.S. senators to identify the best candidates to serve as the chief law enforcement officer in their districts back home, and we are very proud of the work that they are doing to keep all Americans safe.”
Former prosecutors say that even among qualified and well-meaning professionals, bias can skew prosecutorial decisions where there isn’t a varied group considering cases.
It’s something Danny Williams Sr. saw a year after he became a U.S. at
torney in Oklahoma in 2012.
Tulsa police had arrested two groups, one white and the other Black, in separate armed robberies, and the cases ended up before federal prosecutors. The facts were similar, so Williams said he was surprised that the proposed charges that reached his desk were different: The Black defendants were facing more potential prison time.
Williams, who is Black, said he asked the assistant U.S. attorney who’d handled the cases what factual difference accounted for the disparity. The career prosecutor, who is white, responded that the white defendants were college students, Williams said.
“I don’t want this story to
come off as I thought the guy was racist. I just think that he didn’t grasp, in the charging decision, the way he treated these two different groups differently,” Williams said. “It’s just an example of, this is why you need diversity.”
The same charges were ultimately brought in both cases, according to Williams.
To be sure, the way bias plays out is complex and there is not a direct relationship between a prosecutor’s race or sex and the decisions he or she makes.
Though the U.S. attorney may be the public face of a prosecuting office, he or she is hardly the sole decisionmaker, serving instead at the top of a career bureaucracy that relies on the judgment and informed recommendations of lowerlevel officials who often do the complicated investigative work.
After a white South Carolina police officer gunned down Walter Scott, who was Black, in 2015, the Justice Department secured a 20-year prison sentence for the officer.
Jared Fishman, the white former prosecutor who handled the case, “showed so much compassion and he took on my brother’s case as if it was his own family,” said Anthony Scott, Walter’s older brother.
But other families have had their hopes dashed.
After New York prosecutors didn’t bring criminal charges in the death of Eric Garner, the Obama administration launched a federal investigation that was left incomplete and handed off two years later to the Trump administration before Garner’s family got word no charges would be filed.
Garner died in 2014 after a police officer’s chokehold.
And years before George Floyd’s death under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer set off protests around the country, Valerie Castile turned to the federal government after the Minnesota police officer who killed her son was found not to have committed a crime.
Castile described the Justice Department as “our last hope, when these little towns … don’t want to do what’s right.”
Former St. Anthony police Officer Jeronimo Yanez shot Philando Castile, a Black school cafeteria worker, in July 2016, within two minutes of approaching his car during a traffic stop in the Twin Cities suburb of Falcon Heights.
A state court jury acquitted him of second-degree manslaughter the next summer.
After Castile’s death, his mother and political leaders in Minnesota, where police killed at least 60 people between 2008 and 2015, according to state data, pressed for an outside investigation into the shooting and charges of racially biased policing in the region.
Local prosecutors got help in the case from the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office, but no independent federal probe was opened.