WASHINGTON – For the family of Miriam Carey, there was a cruel irony in the awarding of the inaugural Eric H. Holder Jr. Award for Leadership in Law Enforcement to its namesake, former Attorney General Eric Holder, by the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, or NOBLE, on Monday.
That's because it was Holder's Justice Department that stonewalled the investigation of the deadly shooting of unarmed black woman by federal officers on Oct. 3, 2013.
It is a cover-up that continues to this day under his successor, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who presented the award to Holder.
"From the Carey’s family perspective, more than laughable. This NOBLE award is nothing more than political pandering as usual," Carey family attorney Eric Sanders told WND.
Sanders and Miriam's sister, Valarie Carey, are both former New York Police Department officers.
"Valarie and I have a long history with NOBLE and its New York Chapter," said the attorney.
"Please ask the president of NOBLE Gregory Thomas, whom I and Valarie happen to know personally, and who did absolutely nothing to help us with obtaining any information related to the 'avoidable' shooting death of Miriam Iris Carey: How can NOBLE nominate Eric H. Holder Jr. for such an award knowing he stonewalled the full release all of the information related to 'avoidable' shooting death of Miriam Iris Carey?"
WND contacted both outgoing NOBLE President Thomas and President Perry Tarrant (who took office on Wednesday) for comment, but there has been no reply yet.
WND has covered the Carey case story in-depth and continuously, since the very first day, when the unarmed woman was shot in the back and killed by Capitol Police officers and Secret Service agents after making a wrong turn into a White House guard post, then tried to leave.
Officers chased her down and shot her to death, practically in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol.
In December of 2013, famed civil libertarian Nat Hentoff said, from all of the evidence he had seen in WND’s reports, which he called very thorough and easily corroborated, “[T]his is a classic case of police out of control and, therefore, guilty of plain murder.”
And that was before WND obtained a wealth of additional material on the case, including the police report, by filing a pair of Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, requests and successfully suing the Justice Department to release even more information.
WND is represented in its ongoing lawsuit against the Justice Department by the government watchdog group Judicial Watch.
WND is publishing a book on the Carey case on Sept. 27.
The rest of the media have largely ignored the Carey killing after inaccurately reporting at the time of the incident that she had tried to ram a White House gate, led police on a high-speed chase and had run over an officer.
The key points in the case (explained in more detail here) are:
- Carey was shot in the back
- Officers claimed they shot her in self-defense
- Her child in the backseat was covered in glass and blood
- Carey didn’t break any laws
- Carey didn’t try to enter the White House grounds
- Carey did not ram a White House gate
- Officers did not try to prevent Carey from entering a White House guard post
- Officers tried to prevent Carey from leaving a White House guard post
- Officers gave no reason for stopping Carey
- Officers gave no reason for pursuing Carey
- Carey did not flee or speed away
- Carey did not run over an officer
- Police knew Carey was not a terrorist before they shot her
- Secret Service officers violated their use of force policy
- Police statements are missing
- Witness statements are missing
- Evidence is missing
- Police refuse to release findings justifying the shooting
Holder repeatedly ignored Sanders' requests to open a federal civil rights investigation into the killing. Instead, the then-attorney general tried to suppress the pubic release of all the important information on the case, including the police report.
WND managed to obtain most of that information, but is still suing to obtain the Justice Department document showing the findings of the investigation and the reason(s) why the government decided not to recommend criminal charges against the officers who shot and killed Carey.
Sanders informed WND that a NOBLE member had to have submitted Holder’s name with his background before the award was approved by the Board of Directors.
In addition to Holder's stonewall of the shooting of an unarmed black woman, there is ample evidence in Holder's history, as WND has documented, to indicate he is particularly unsuited to receive an award for leadership in law enforcement.
Another little-known police shooting in the nation's capital may be illustrative. In that case, an officer shot an unarmed suspect in the back four times while he was lying on the ground. The shooter was never even interviewed by police. The man in charge of that investigation? Eric Holder.
Police shootings in Washington were the subject of a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post investigation in 1998. The five-part series indicated Holder's performance as an investigator of police shootings was dismal.
As U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia from 1993 to 1997, Holder was in charge of investigating police shootings by local officers. The Post investigation discovered the number of people shot by Washington police doubled between 1988 and 1995. Sixteen people were shot by police under Holder's watch just in 1995. Not only did police shootings mushroom during his tenure, almost one-third of those between 1994 and 1997 weren't even counted by his department.
The paper published a map showing 20 unarmed civilians were shot by Washington police from 1994 to 1998. Eight of those unarmed people were killed by police.
USA Today revived the Post investigation during the Ferguson protests with an opinion piece by author James Bovard, who declared during Holder's reign he did "little to protect Washington residents from rampaging lawmen" as police violence "spiraled out of control." The article said Holder largely ignored abusive actions by police as civilians were shot and killed by officers at a rate higher than any other major city police department. Bovard said Holder's promise to conduct a full and fair investigation of the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson was belied by "his own record."
At the time of the Post series, Assistant Washington Police Chief Terrance Gainer even had to admit, "We shoot too often, and we shoot too much when we do shoot."
The Post found Washington police were not prosecuted by Holder even when police review boards ruled shootings unjustified or discovered contradictions in officers' testimony.
The solution? Kill the review board.
Even after a judge blasted the Washington government for "deliberate indifference" to charges of police brutality, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, overwhelmed by a glut of complaints, was shut down in 1995.
Bovard said the Post series caused such an uproar, it sparked a Justice Department Civil Rights division investigation into five years of Washington police shootings, but, "[W]ho did Attorney General Janet Reno put in charge of that effort? Eric Holder."
Holder's office denied any conflict of interest, but an attorney for a couple who successfully sued the district for $150,000 after an officer shot and killed their son in 1995 told the Post, "When I heard who was conducting the review, I could just feel my blood boiling because you've got the hen guarding the foxes."
Michael Morgenstern scornfully said of Holder, "He had the opportunity to do this when he was there, and now all of a sudden, they're sending him back to do the same job he didn't do while he was there."
Some of the information the Post uncovered has been echoed in the Carey case.
According to the paper, a number of officer shootings of civilians under Holder's watch were kept from the public view, with police investigating in secret and producing reports only when ordered to by a judge.
Similarly, the final investigative report in the Carey shooting was never released until WND successfully filed an appeal with the Washington mayor. The actions of the U.S. Secret Service uniformed officers and U.S. Capitol Police were investigated by the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department. That investigation was reviewed by the U.S. Attorney's Office for Washington, D.C., which is part of the Justice Department, or DOJ.
But, after authorities announced on July 10, 2014, they had decided not to press charges against any of the officers who shot and killed Carey, the final investigative report on the case was not released. The public was merely told there was insufficient evidence to bring charges, and was not allowed to see the evidence or the report.
It was only because of WND's lawsuit, FOIA requests and appeal that the police report and the evidence ever became public.
The Post also found some of the worst cases of police abuse under Holder involved officers shooting into cars, which is strongly discouraged due to the risk of hitting bystanders. Holder said he did not recall more than a few such instances, but the Post discovered more than 50 officers had shot at unarmed drivers over five years. The paper also reported instances of police perjury in some of those shootings. And, the Post learned Washington police shot at cars 20 times more often than New York City police.
Statistics on officer shootings are hard to come by because most police departments do not publish those numbers and because the federal government doesn't either, even though, in 1994 Congress ordered the attorney general to publish an annual summary on the use of excessive force by police officers as part of the Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Control Act.
Even government statisticians have had to use Google News alerts to track officer-involved shootings.
There is one source researchers often use: Former FBI agent Jim Fisher methodically combed the Internet to compile the number of police shootings in 2011.
From the information that can be gleaned, police shootings in the nation's capital did not appear to have gotten much better under Holder as attorney general, where he was the top law-enforcement official in the district, as well as the nation.
Fisher's website did not list police shootings in the nation's capital, but he told WND there were 11 in Washington, D.C., in 2011, six of which were fatal.
An Internet search by WND showed at least four police shootings in the nation's capital in 2012 and another four in 2013.
All those numbers appear to dwarf officer-involved shootings by St. Louis County police in the Ferguson area. As far as can be discerned by an Internet search, the last police shooting of civilians by the department in was in Berkeley, a town adjacent to Ferguson, in 2000. Two unarmed men were shot as part of a drug bust. Two officers said they feared for their lives, the shootings were ruled justified and they were not indicted.
So, why did Holder pay such attention to the Michael Brown shooting? He said he hoped his visit would help calm the area. But the attorney general specifically cited race as a reason for going to Ferguson. He told residents there, "I am the attorney general of the United States, but I am also a black man."
The nation's top law-enforcement official recounted the humiliation and anger he felt in earlier years after being stopped for speeding twice on the New Jersey turnpike, and the "impact" it had on him. Holder referred to the racial "mistrust and mutual suspicion" between the black community and law enforcement.
But race did not appear to motivate Holder to crack down on the epidemic of police shootings in Washington, D.C., either during his tenure as U.S. attorney or attorney general. That was despite the fact, after his selection by President Clinton in 1993, Holder became the first African-American to become the district's U.S. attorney.
Despite the dearth of data, it would stand to reason a significant number of police shooting victims during his time as U.S. attorney were black, as African-Americans comprise Washington's largest ethnic group at more than 50 percent of the population. But, instead of making any apparent attempt to ease any tensions between the black community and police, his department became the subject of a Justice Department investigation into police abuse.