Bravo, Attorney General Sessions: Enforcing Law for Murdered Transgender Student

Kedarie Johnson was a 16-year-old student when he was shot to death last year in Burlington, Iowa. Johnson (pictured) was gay, identified as both male and female and occasionally went by the name Kandicee.

On Friday, the U.S. Justice Department filed papers in an Iowa county court to say that Christopher Perras, a U.S. Justice Department lawyer, will serve as a county prosecutor in the case.

That almost never happens. It indicates AG Sessions’ intent to lend the DOJ’s experience in enforcing The Shepard-Byrd Hate Crime Act.

The symbolism is important.

Question: Will the DOJ attorney’s close involvement with the case enable the federal government to press federal hate crime charges? That remains to be seen, but that’s the implication. For now, it appears that the evidence is too ambiguous but to make that charge-- but that could change with this lawyer's cultivation of facts.

Last week, our employment law class discussed a leading case from 1875 (U.S. v. Cruikshank) where the Supreme Court struck down the nation’s first hate crime law known as the Ku Klux Klan Act. That case led to another bad case (U.S. v. Hodges, 1906), where the Court ruled that the federal government had no constitutional authority to enforce the Ku Klux Klan Act’s criminal code. 

In that case, white workers who beat and intimidated black workers to the point of forcing them to quit their jobs. They were set free from jail.

In 1968—after a century passed from when Congress enacted the Ku Klux Klan Act, Congress passed the 1968 Civil Rights Act. The law defined a federal crime to kill a person on account of race. In 2009, the law was expanded to cover murders and other assaults, where the motivation is to harm someone due to sexual orientation or transgender status (know as the Shepard-Byrd Act of 2009).
The point? It has taken 100 years to restore the federal law against hate crimes. AG Sessions offers hope that these gains have not been lost.