WASHINGTON — Two days after the Justice Department announced federal indictments related to the fatal beating of a Mexican immigrant in Shenandoah, Pa., federal authorities said the charges were part of a larger effort to step up civil rights enforcement after nearly eight years of decreased hate crime prosecutions.
Thomas E. Perez, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said the department brought more federal hate crime cases this year than in any other year since 2001.
During the budget year that ended in September, 25 hate crime cases were filed, Mr. Perez said. By comparison, that number fell to a low of 12 in 2006, before rising to 23 in 2008. In 2001, 31 such cases were filed.
Mr. Perez said he was “shocked to see the downtick in prosecutions of hate crimes” during the George W. Bush administration, adding, “The Civil Rights Division is again open for business.”
Mr. Perez’s comments came after a federal indictment released Tuesday charged Chief Matthew Nestor, Lt. William Moyer and Officer Jason Hayes of the Shenandoah police with obstruction of justice. They are accusing of writing false and misleading reports about the beating death of Luís Ramírez, a 25-year-old illegal immigrant.
At the time of Mr. Ramírez’s death in July 2008, Officer Hayes was dating the mother of one of the white teenagers accused in the case, and Lieutenant Moyer’s son was on the high school football team with the teenagers.
In a civil suit scheduled to go to trial next summer, Chief Nestor is accused of taking part in the fatal beating of a Hispanic teenager in 2004 and participating in an effort to make it look like a suicide. He has denied any wrongdoing.
This month, the Government Accountability Office released a report auditing the activities of the Civil Rights Division from 2001 to 2007. It concluded that there had been a drop in the enforcement of several major antidiscrimination and voting rights laws under the Bush administration compared with the Clinton administration.
Republicans have accused the current Justice Department of politicizing the division. They have pointed to a decision to downgrade voter-intimidation charges stemming from an episode in the 2008 election in which two members of the New Black Panther Party stood outside a Philadelphia precinct in militia uniforms, one of them holding a nightstick. That decision is being investigated by the Justice Department’s internal ethics office.
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