The House Judiciary Committee reauthorized and tweaked two George W. Bush-era criminal justice reform programs on Tuesday as part of its push to humanize the US judicial system.
But it must start tackling a problem raised only in recent years by the Black Lives Matter movement if it wants to foster wider confidence in American law enforcement officials, one committee member said.
“We’ve got a problem in this country, a racial problem with police shootings—mostly at African American individuals who have been the subject of shootings that are, indeed, questionable, at best,” Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) remarked.
As a remedy, Cohen touted legislation he introduced last year that would encourage states to establish special prosecutors—to look into incidents when cops use deadly force to kill or injure.
“The bill helps prosecutors,” he said. “Asking they investigate the same police they work with on a regular basis is unfair. That hand-in-glove relationship is there, and it makes people think that the prosecutor may be acting in favor of one side or the other.”
“Justice always and should be blind and, like Caesar’s wife, beyond reproach,” he added. “Even if prosecutors handle those cases perfectly, there will be a perception of bias, and that is something we can’t accept in our American system.”
Cohen noted that the bill recently earned the support of the conservative Chicago Tribune as the city has grappled with the fallout over the killing of a black teenager by a Chicago police officer and a department cover-up.
Laquan McDonald, 17, was shot 16 times by Officer Jason Van Dyke in October 2014, while walking away from his killer, according to dashcam footage publicly released in November. The Chicago Police Department had initially tried to claim McDonald lunged at Van Dyke with a knife.
Lawyers for the deceased teenager’s family said in January that police officers were intimidating witnesses at the scene of the crime into falsifying accounts. In November, as a judge ordered the city’s prosecutors to release the dashcam footage amid what the Tribune called “intense public outcry,” Van Dyke was indicted on first degree murder charges.
Rep. Cohen’s bill, the Police Training and Accountability Act of 2015, has 59 co-sponsors. All of them are House Democrats.
Late last year, The Guardian reported that 15 percent of the 1,134 Americans killed by police in 2015 were black males between the ages of 15 and 34 years old–a cohort consisting of only 2 percent of the wider US population.
“Overall in 2015, black people were killed at twice the rate of white, Hispanic and native Americans,” the paper said. Unarmed victims of police violence were about 50 percent more likely to be black than white.
The bills marked up on Tuesday by the committee renew and reform mental health and returning-citizen rehabilitation programs that were created in 2004 and 2008.
“Most of the people currently imprisoned will one day return to society, and it’s in all of our best interests to give these individuals a second chance and a hand up,” the judiciary subcommittee on crime chair, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), said. “This legislation reduces prison costs, improves public safety, and produces significant savings to the American taxpayers.”
The House Judiciary Committee last November took aim at a pillar of the War on Drugs, when it passed legislation that would reduce mandatory minimums for certain non-violent drug offenders. The measure was marked up by the committee one month after its Senate counterpart approved of similar proposals.
On Tuesday, House Judiciary Committee Chair Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said that Congressional Republicans won’t sign off on a final reform package without narrowing the statutory definition of a criminal offense—to one where criminal intent must be proven by prosecutors.
The move has been on the wishlist of right-wing think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation and the Koch Bros.-backed FreedomWorks.
“A deal that does not address this issue is not going anywhere in the House of Representatives,” Goodlatte said. “It has to be overcome. This is a critical element to doing justice in this country.”
