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Saturday, August 23, 2014

Facts for Ferguson

Andrew C. McCarthy reviews Attorney General Eric Holder's visit to Ferguson, Missouri, in this NRO column. It's an article intended for readers interested in common sense and legal reality, not emotion and reaction.

Below is an excerpt:

If the Justice Department would not open a civil-rights investigation based on a black police officer’s shooting of a civilian, whatever the victim’s race, then a white officer is just as entitled to that presumption of innocence. It is no more legitimate for the Justice Department to target a white cop for being white than for a white cop to target a black man for being black. Both would be examples of what the civil-rights laws call “deprivation of rights under color of law.”

McCarthy is the former US attorney who led the prosecution of the terrorists responsible for the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.