Harry Litman - A Prosecutor's Take on the Minnesota Shooting
With protests over the fatal shooting of Renee Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross now cresting nationwide, the case has taken its place alongside a small number of episodes that have not merely shocked the country, but have forced it to confront foundational questions about power, accountability, and the rule of law. Rodney King. Kent State. George Floyd. Each involved lethal or near-lethal force by agents of the state, captured on camera, followed by a national reckoning over whether the system was capable of holding itself to account.
This case has quickly become a national Rorschach test. Public reaction has split sharply along partisan lines, with large majorities of Republicans viewing the shooting as justified and large majorities of Democrats viewing it as unjustified. That divide is familiar, if dispiriting. What makes this moment genuinely new, and genuinely alarming, is not public disagreement, but the response of the federal government, which has chosen to close ranks rather than open an investigation.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has publicly stated that the Justice Department sees no basis for opening a civil-rights investigation into the killing. It is difficult to overstate how extraordinary that conclusion is at this stage. The country has been transfixed by video of the shooting. Independent analysts and journalists are still reconstructing the sequence of events frame by frame. And yet the Department charged with enforcing the Constitution has announced, effectively at the outset, that it will not even investigate formally.
The DOJ’s actions have followed its words. The Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division, the unit that for decades has handled unlawful uses of force by law-enforcement officers, has been sidelined. Four senior career officials from that section resigned in protest. More striking still, six career prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Minnesota followed suit, reportedly after being pressed to give Ross a pass while redirecting investigative attention toward the widow of Renee Good.
https://harrylitman.substack.com/p/a-prosecutors-take-on-the-minnesota
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