Days after the Justice Department announced it would not bring civil rights charges in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, attorney general Eric Holder said he planned to propose adjustments to federal civil rights laws before he steps down.
Holder said in interviews that in his final weeks in office, he plans to share “specific proposals” about lowering standards of proof for civil rights crimes.
“We do need to change the law. I do think the standard is too high,” Holder said in an interview with NBC News. “There needs to be a change with regard to the standard of proof.”
In September 2014, Holder announced he was stepping down as head of the Justice Department, a post he has held since Barack Obama took office. The Senate is expected to confirm Loretta Lynch to take over in March.
The Justice Department on Tuesday said it had closed its investigation into one of the touchstone civil rights cases of Holder’s tenure – the shooting death of black teenager Trayvon Martin. The department said it had found “insufficient evidence” to charge the gunman, neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman.
Zimmerman faced a trial, but was acquitted.
To press charges in a federal civil rights case, the Justice Department must prove that a person intentionally shot someone because of their race.
Victor Goode, an associate professor of law at CUNY School of Law, said this standard was much easier to prove during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s and 1970s, when crimes could be tied to groups such as the Ku Klux Klan or others that had declared support for violent acts against minorities. In high-profile fatal shootings by police officers in recent years, the standard is much more difficult to prove.
“Unless the police issued a racial epithet moments before they shot someone, it’s almost impossible to determine what their motivation was,” said Goode. “Especially when after the shooting they openly state to their superiors: ‘I was in fear of my life and I openly discharged in accordance with my police training.’”
Legal experts doubted that Zimmerman would be charged before the Justice Department announced its decision this week.
People are also skeptical about the results of a pending civil rights investigation into the fatal shooting of another black teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri last August. Earlier this month, Holder said the results of that case will be announced before he steps down.
The Justice Department is also pursuing a civil rights investigation into the death of Eric Garner, a Staten Island man who died last July after being put in a chokehold by a New York police officer.
In the Brown and Garner cases, grand juries voted not to indict the police officers involved, preventing the cases from being brought to trial.
