Justice Dept. to Address Backlog of Civil Rights Complaints

By Krissah Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 25, 2009 3:19 PM

There is the ongoing review of the death of a man beaten by four white teenagers in a park in Shenandoah, Pa. The kids, all high school football players, shouted, "Go back to Mexico," before one punched him repeatedly with a metal shank balled up in his fist, according to witnesses. Then, another kicked him on the left side of his head so hard that the Mexican man's brain began to swell. He died two days later, his fiancee weeping at his side.

There is the continuing silence three years after hundreds took to the streets of Tallahassee, protesting the acquittal of seven guards in the death of a 14 year-old black boy, one of whom gave a quick knee to the boy's stomach as another forced him to inhale smelling salts. The grainy black-and-white video of the boy collapsing on a grassy field in a state-run boot camp for delinquents is set to music and posted on YouTube -- a hovering reminder of a death still in dispute.

And there are the unanswered letters that fill the file drawer in Madie Robinson's office. The president of the NAACP branch in Florence, S.C., has kept a copy of every complaint she's mailed to the U.S. Department of Justice since 2003 -- a half-dozen in all -- every letter another plea for federal officials to look into voting practices that she and other NAACP members think are suspicious.

The ongoing look into the beaten man's case, the federal review promised to the Tallahassee protesters and Robinson's letters are somewhere in the backlog of concerns waiting as the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division -- once the nation's premier protectors of minorities' rights -- is rebuilt.

(More here.)

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