A.G. nominee has history prosecuting police brutality

Washington • Loretta Lynch was a federal prosecutor in New York when she encountered an astonishing case of police brutality: the broomstick sodomy of a Haitian immigrant in a precinct restroom.

The 1997 assault on Abner Louima set off street protests, frayed race relations and led to one of the most important federal civil rights cases of the past two decades — with Lynch a key part of the team that prosecuted officers accused in the beating or of covering it up.

President Barack Obama's nomination of Lynch to be attorney general comes as the Justice Department continues to investigate the police shooting of an unarmed black 18-year-old in Ferguson, Missouri, and seems partly intended to convey the message that police misconduct and civil rights will remain a principal focus even after the departure of Eric Holder.

If confirmed by the Senate, Lynch would be the first black woman in the job and would follow the first black attorney general.

Lynch has overseen corruption, terrorism and gang cases in her years as a federal prosecutor. But it's her involvement 15 years ago in the Louima prosecution that gave her high-profile experience in step with a core priority of the Justice Department.

"It is certainly significant that she has a personal history of involvement in prosecuting police misconduct," said Samuel Bagenstos, the former No. 2 official in the department's civil rights division. "Obviously that will be helpful, and probably suggests that police misconduct cases will continue to be a priority of the Lynch Justice Department just as they were with the Holder Justice Department.

Lawyers say Obama likely selected Lynch, 55, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, on the strength of a varied career and stature within the department.

"She has spent years in the trenches as a prosecutor, aggressively fighting terrorism, financial fraud, cybercrime, all while vigorously defending civil rights," Obama said in introducing Lynch at the White House ceremony Saturday. He said her prosecution of the officers in the Louima case was "one of her proudest achievements."

But there's also no doubt that selecting someone with civil rights experience would reaffirm the government's commitment to that cause. That figures to be an especially important signal to send as community members in Ferguson brace for the real prospect that state and federal investigations into the shooting death of Michael Brown will close without criminal charges, outcomes that could disillusion civil rights activists and community members. Holder has said he expects the federal investigation to conclude before he resigns, but Lynch still would inherit a civil rights probe into the practices of the Ferguson Police Department. That investigation is one of roughly 20 that the Justice Department has initiated into troubled police departments in the past five years, more than twice the number undertaken in the previous five years. Those cases are part of a broader civil rights push — including challenging strict state voter-identification laws and promoting changes in how federal prosecutors negotiate sentences — likely to help shape Holder's legacy.

Her office, which encompasses Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island and Staten Island, won convictions in a thwarted plot to bomb the city's subway system, successfully prosecuted a New York state assemblyman caught accepting bribes in a sting operation and, more recently, filed tax evasion charges against Republican Rep. Michael Grimm. But it was the case of Louima, tortured with a broken broomstick on a restroom floor, that elevated her profile. In a Senate questionnaire for the job of U.S. attorney, she placed the case second — behind only a sexual harassment matter involving a city councilman — on a list of the most significant cases she personally handled.