City Desk

Posts Tagged ‘attorney general’

Councilmember Alexander Raises Concerns Over AG Nickles

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In our running poll of the D.C. Council's Judiciary Committee members regarding AG Peter Nickles' conduct, we finally reached Councilmember Yvette Alexander.

Nickles has come under fire recently for his office's conduct in a Pershing Park civil suit. District evidence has either been destroyed or lost and discovery continues to be a problem in that case. The discovery process has dragged on for years. The U.S. District Court judge in the case slammed the OAG, ordered Nickles to submit a sworn statement explaining his office's actions, and called on the D.C. Council to investigate the OAG's handling of the case. The issues before Nickles include one very false affidavit.

So far Councilmember Mary Cheh has called for Nickles to resign. Yesterday, Councilmember Phil Mendelson joined Cheh in pushing for Nickles to rejoin the private sector.  Councilmember Jack Evans still fully supports Nickles.

Alexander says she is reserving judgment on Nickles for the time being. She would like to see the council take up the matter. "I wouldn't have a problem with requesting an investigation," she tells City Desk. "You are innocent until proven guilty. I would want to know what happened with the evidence."

If there was purposeful or criminal mishandling of evidence, Alexander says, then Nickles should be ousted.

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ACLU Scolds Holder for Failing to End Racial Profiling

Racial profiling that became widespread during the Bush days is still with us, according a new report co-authored by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Despite U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s willingness to talk about race in America and his pledge to end racial profiling, his Department of Justice hasn’t done much to dismantle Bush-era guidelines on national security; Those guidelines not only promote racial profiling by the Federal Bureau of Investigation but create justification for state and local law enforcement agents to do it too, the ACLU charges.

"Racial profiling remains a widespread and pervasive problem throughout the U.S., impacting the lives of millions of people in the African American, Asian, Latino, South Asian, Arab and Muslim communities," Chandra Bhatnagar, staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program and the main author of the report said in a press release. "The U.S. government must take urgent, direct action to rid the nation of the scourge of racial and ethnic profiling and bring this country into conformity with both the Constitution and international human rights obligations."

The ACLU made the charges in a report to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. To read the press release or the entire report, click here.

Eric Holder, Extreme Drug Warrior

As if his soft stance on corruption wasn't sufficient evidence enough that Eric Holder is a questionable choice for attorney general, there's also his stance on drugs, which during his time as a U.S. Attorney in D.C. was too harsh.

In 1996, Holder proposed cracking down on marijuana users and sellers, a policy perspective which was and---assuming he still holds it---is completely antithetical to President-Elect Barack Obama's promise to end federal crackdowns on medical marijuana dispensaries.

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A.G. Appointee Eric Holder Soft on Corruption

Eric H. Holder, Jr., former Deputy Attorney General and senior legal advisor to President-elect Barack Obama, was tapped today to serve as Obama's Attorney General, Newsweek reports. (Holder also served as co-chief of Obama's veep selection committee.)

In a cover story in 1997—the same year Clinton nominated Holder for Dep. Attorney General—City Paper questioned Holder's approach to corruption during his tenure as U.S. Attorney for D.C.

But for all the love Holder has engendered in the community as U.S. Attorney, he has had precious little impact on the city's endemic municipal corruption.

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