Back Channels: Panther case dismissal needs explanation

For more than a year, Attorney General Eric Holder has failed to adequately explain why his Justice Department dropped a slam-dunk voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party.

His department's answers to inquiries have been incomplete and unsatisfactory. Career attorneys involved in the case have not been available for questioning, even when subpoenaed.

Now, one lawyer is speaking up - and making damning allegations against the Justice Department.

J. Christian Adams, who was a Justice Department voting-rights lawyer until he resigned last month, is scheduled to testify before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on Tuesday. At issue are the events of Election Day 2008 in Philadelphia.

Here's how a Justice Department complaint filed in January 2009 described those events:

Samir Shabazz, head of the Philadelphia chapter of the New Black Panther Party, and party member Jerry Jackson were "deployed" in front of a Fairmount Avenue polling place in "military style uniforms."

Shabazz brandished a nightstick. He "pointed the weapon at individuals, menacingly tapped it [in] his other hand, or menacingly tapped it elsewhere." Both Shabazz and Jackson leveled "racial threats and racial insults at both black and white individuals," and they "made menacing and intimidating gestures, statements, and movements directed at individuals who were present to aid voters."

The two men, the party, and its national chairman were named in the complaint. Since none responded, the case was all but won.

However, in May 2009, the Justice Department dropped claims against all but Shabazz, who was merely ordered not to take a weapon to a Philadelphia polling place through 2012.

U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R., Va.), a Philly native, has repeatedly called for an explanation. The Civil Rights Commission has held hearings on the case. In May, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez told the commission that the case had been re-reviewed, and the evidence deemed insufficient to proceed.

"That claim is false," Adams, the former Justice lawyer, wrote in the Washington Times last month. "If the actions in Philadelphia do not constitute voter intimidation, it is hard to imagine what would, short of an actual outbreak of violence at the polls."