At Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on Police Brutality, Blumenthal Calls for Reform to Legal Barriers to Accountability

[WASHINGTON, D.C.] – At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today on “Police Use of Force and Community Relations,” U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) raised concerns regarding legal barriers to police accountability and shared the words and stories of Black children and young people he has met at recent protests across Connecticut.

“I want to lift up and give voice to some of the young people I have heard at demonstrations all around the state of Connecticut,” Blumenthal said. “A young woman, Imani Tyson, she’s sixteen-years-old, in high school in Bridgeport, and she’s telling us: ‘wake up / stand up / they gonna knock you down / stand up / they’re gonna run you around / stand up!’ The voice of Deon Forbes, ten-years old, six years younger than Imani. ‘They kill us because we are strong. They kill us because we are powerful. Our lives matter. We deserve to breathe.’ That’s what he said in a rally on Sunday standing before three hundred or so people in downtown New Haven.”

In an exchange with Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights President Vanita Gupta, Blumenthal discussed the criminal statute used to hold law enforcement officers accountable for the use of excessive force: 18 U.S.C § 242. Under current law, prosecutors must prove that a law enforcement officer had the “specific intent” to deprive a person of their constitutional rights. This standard is the highest state of mind requirement that exists in the law.

“One of the principle steps in the Justice in Policing Act that you endorse persuasively in your testimony is the change in state of mind requirement that would be required from ‘willfully’ to ‘knowingly with reckless disregard.’ You were responsible in the Department of Justice for helping to enforce this measure. Would you please explain to Americans why that change would make a difference and why it would act as a deterrent to the kind of brutal killing that we saw in George Floyd and the other countless atrocities that have happened in recent weeks and months?” Blumenthal asked.

Gupta, the former Acting Assistant Attorney General and Head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, shared her experience in trying to hold law enforcement officers accused of egregious misconduct accountable under this standard.

“For any of us that watched that video perhaps too many times of Officer Chauvin with his knee on George Floyd’s neck – he looked straight into the cameras, he looked at them for a long time because he in no world imagined that he would ever be held to account for his actions. Because over and over again in this country, there has not been accountability, criminally or civil – for qualified immunity protections – for officers that act this way. And there is simply to way to understand the look on Officer Chauvin’s face and not look directly at our completely poor systems of accountability,” Gupta added.

The Blumenthal-sponsored Justice in Policing Act would amend 18 U.S.C. Section 242, the federal criminal statute to prosecute police misconduct, from “willfulness” to a “recklessness” standard.

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