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<DIV><FONT size=4>From: <EM>The Washington Post</EM>, 11-13-05</FONT></DIV>
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<DIV style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 165px"></DIV><FONT size=+2><B>Civil Rights Focus Shift
Roils Staff At Justice</B></FONT><BR>Veterans Exit Division as Traditional Cases
Decline<BR>
<P><FONT size=-1>By Dan Eggen<BR>Washington Post Staff Writer<BR>Sunday,
November 13, 2005; A01<BR></FONT>
<P><NITF>
<P>The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, which has enforced the
nation's anti-discrimination laws for nearly half a century, is in the midst of
an upheaval that has driven away dozens of veteran lawyers and has damaged
morale for many of those who remain, according to former and current career
employees.</P>
<P>Nearly 20 percent of the division's lawyers left in fiscal 2005, in part
because of a buyout program that some lawyers believe was aimed at pushing out
those who did not share the administration's conservative views on civil rights
laws. Longtime litigators complain that political appointees have cut them out
of hiring and major policy decisions, including approvals of controversial GOP
redistricting plans in Mississippi and Texas.</P>
<P>At the same time, prosecutions for the kinds of racial and gender
discrimination crimes traditionally handled by the division have declined 40
percent over the past five years, according to department statistics. Dozens of
lawyers find themselves handling appeals of deportation orders and other
immigration matters instead of civil rights cases.</P>
<P>The division has also come under criticism from the courts and some Democrats
for its decision in August to approve a Georgia program requiring voters to
present government-issued identification cards at the polls. The program was
halted by an appellate court panel and a district court judge, who likened it to
a poll tax from the Jim Crow era.</P>
<P>"Most everyone in the Civil Rights Division realized that with the change of
administration, there would be some cutting back of some cases," said Richard
Ugelow, who left the division in 2004 and now teaches law at American
University. "But I don't think people anticipated that it would go this far,
that enforcement would be cut back to the point that people felt like they were
spinning their wheels."</P>
<P>The Justice Department and its supporters strongly dispute the complaints.
Justice spokesman Eric Holland noted that the overall attrition rate during the
Bush administration, about 13 percent, is not significantly higher than the 11
percent average during the last five years under President Bill Clinton.</P>
<P>Holland also said that the division filed a record number of criminal
prosecutions in 2004. A quarter of those cases were related tohuman-trafficking
crimes, which were made easier to prosecute under legislation passed at the end
of the Clinton administration and which account for a growing proportion of the
division's caseload.</P>
<P>In addition, Holland defended the department's decision to approve the
Georgia voter law, saying that "career and political attorneys together
concluded" that the measure would have no negative effect on minorities.</P>
<P>"This administration has continued the robust and vigorous enforcement of
civil rights laws," Holland wrote in an e-mail statement, adding later: "These
accomplishments could not have been achieved without teamwork between career
attorneys and political appointees."</P>
<P>Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, the first Hispanic to hold the job,
named civil rights enforcement as one of his priorities after taking office
earlier this year and supports reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act.</P>
<P>Although relations between the career and political ranks have been strained
throughout the Justice Department over the past five years, the level of
conflict has been particularly high in civil rights, according to current and
former staffers. The debate over civil rights flared in the Senate in recent
weeks after the nomination of Wan J. Kim, who was confirmed on Nov. 4 as the
assistant attorney general for the division and is the third person to hold that
job during the Bush administration. Kim has been the civil rights deputy for the
past two years.</P>
<P>There were no serious objections to Kim's nomination, but Democrats including
Sens. Richard J. Durbin (Ill.) and Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.) said they were
concerned about serious problems with morale and enforcement within the
division.</P>
<P>"Its enforcement of civil rights over the past five years has been
negligent," Kennedy said in a statement. "Mr. Kim has promised to look closely
at these issues and to increase the division's enforcement, and I believed he
should be given a chance to turn the division around."</P>
<P>Critics point to several key statistics in arguing that Gonzales and the
previous attorney general, John D. Ashcroft, have charted a dramatically
different course for civil rights enforcement than previous administrations of
both parties.</P>
<P>The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which includes a number of
former Justice lawyers, noted in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee that
the division has filed only a handful of cases in recent years dealing with
employment discrimination or discrimination based on the statistical impact on
women or minority groups.</P>
<P>The total number of criminal prosecutions is within the range of the Clinton
administration, but a growing percentage of those cases involve prosecuting
human smugglers, which have become a priority for the division only in recent
years. Other types of civil rights prosecutions are down, from 83 in fiscal 2001
to 49 in 2005.</P>
<P>The Bush administration has filed only three lawsuits -- all of them this
year -- under the section of the Voting Rights Act that prohibits discrimination
against minority voters, and none of them involves discrimination against
blacks. The initial case was the Justice Department's first
reverse-discrimination lawsuit, accusing a majority-black county in Mississippi
of discriminating against white voters.</P>
<P>The change in emphasis is perhaps most stark in the division's appellate
section, which has historically played a prominent role intervening in key
discrimination cases. The section filed only three friend-of-the-court briefs
last year -- compared with 22 in 1999 -- and now spends nearly half its time
defendingdeportation orders rather than pursuing civil rights litigation. Last
year, six of 10 briefs filed by the section were related to immigration
cases.</P>
<P>William R. Yeomans, a 24-year division veteran who took a buyout offer
earlier this year, wrote in an essay in Legal Affairs magazine that "morale
among career attorneys has plummeted, the division's productivity has suffered
and the pace of civil rights enforcement has slowed."</P>
<P>In an interview, Yeomans said some of the problems stem from the way the
"front office" at Justice has treated career employees, many of whom have been
forced to move to other divisions or to handle cases unconnected to civil
rights. As an example of the strained relations, Yeomans points to the recent
retirement party held for a widely admired 37-year veteran: Not one political
appointee showed up.</P>
<P>At the same time, Ashcroft implemented procedures throughout Justice that
limited the input of career lawyers in employment decisions, resulting in the
hiring of many young conservatives in civil rights and elsewhere in the
department, former and current lawyers have said.</P>
<P>"The more slots you open, the more you can populate them with people you
like," said Stephen B. Pershing, who left the division in May and is now senior
counsel at the Center for Constitutional Litigation, a Washington law firm that
handles civil rights cases. "It's pretty simple really."</P>
<P>To Roger Clegg, the situation is also perfectly understandable. A former
civil rights deputy in the Reagan administration who is now general counsel at
the Center for Equal Opportunity, Clegg said the civil rights area tends to
attract activist liberal lawyers who are philosophically opposed to a more
conservative approach.</P>
<P>"If the career people are not reflecting the policy priorities of the
political appointees, then there's a problem," Clegg said. "Elections have
consequences in a democracy."</P>
<P>Holland, the Justice spokesman, said critics are selectively citing
statistics. For example, he said, the department is on the winning side of court
rulings 90 percent of the time compared with 60 percent during the Clinton
years. Federal courts are "less likely to reject our legal arguments than the
ones filed in the previous administration," he said.</P>
<P>Ralph F. Boyd Jr., the civil rights chief from 2001 to 2003, agreed: "It's
not a prosecutor's job to bring lots of cases; it's a prosecutor's job to bring
the right cases. If it means fewer cases overall, then that's what you
do."</P></NITF><!-- start the copyright for the articles -->
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