She has an outstanding record of successful prosecutions, including the terrorists who plotted to bomb the Federal Reserve Bank and the New York subway system, some of New York’s most violent and notorious mobsters and gang members, and corrupt public officials from both parties. She has also won a number of Wall Street financial fraud cases. In 1999, she famously prosecuted one of the most egregious cases of police brutality in New York City history, the beating and sexual assault of Haitian immigrant, Abner Louima.
In nominating Lynch, President Obama said, “It is pretty hard to be more qualified for this job than Loretta. Throughout her 30-year career, she has distinguished herself as tough, as fair, an independent lawyer who has twice headed the most prominent offices in the country. She has spent years in the trenches as a prosecutor, aggressively fighting terrorism, financial fraud, cyber-crime, all while vigorously defending civil rights.”
A native of Greensboro, N.C., the daughter of a Baptist minister and the granddaughter of a pastor/sharecropper, Lynch’s dedication to protecting civil rights and ensuring equal justice is part of her DNA. Her background and experiences also inform her commitment to common sense criminal justice reforms designed to make our system smarter and fairer. She remembers as a child riding on her father’s shoulders to student anti-segregation boycott meetings at his church. She also recalls her sharecropper grandfather lamenting, “In rural North Carolina in the 1930s, if you were poor and Black and got in trouble with the law, you had very little recourse.” As a lawyer and U.S. attorney, Lynch’s career has been undergirded by an unshakeable belief that, as she states, “Justice is only served when people feel protected by their government rather than targeted.”
Those are the values we look for most in the People’s Lawyer. We urge the Senate to confirm Loretta Lynch as the next United States Attorney General without delay.
(Marc H. Morial, former mayor of New Orleans, is president and CEO of the National Urban League.)
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