Harry Litman - The Minnesota Case Gets Uglier

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

The stunning resignations on Monday of four senior career officials from the Criminal Section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division confirm that DOJ has gone profoundly off the rails in its handling of what increasingly appears to be one of the gravest excessive-force cases in decades.

The resignations, an ultimate eloquent gesture, reportedly had multiple causes. The central one was the sidelining of the Criminal Section from the investigation of the January 7 fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross.

In any normal, professionally run Department of Justice—Democratic or Republican—a shooting that looks this serious on its face would trigger a searching civil-rights investigation by the Criminal Section, the Department’s longstanding unit for prosecuting unlawful uses of force. That has been true whether the assailant was a state officer, as in Rodney King, or—more rarely—a federal one, as at Ruby Ridge. (I served in the Department during both and worked on the King case, and I’ll be writing about some of the lessons from that case in coming Substack pieces.)

ICE has steadfastly maintained that the shooting was justified because Ross reasonably believed that Good was attempting to run him over. But multiple bystander videos and visual analyses have seriously undermined that self-serving account. I put the point in that lawyerly, hedged way because, for present purposes, it is more than enough to establish beyond any cavil that this case demands the most thorough investigation the federal government can muster.

https://harrylitman.substack.com/p/the-minnesota-case-gets-uglier