The U.S. Department of Justice has opened an investigation of the prosecutor’s office in Minnesota’s most populous county after its leader directed her staff to consider racial disparities as one factor when negotiating plea deals.
Harmeet Dhillon, a Republican lawyer who’s the new director of the agency’s Civil Rights Division, announced the investigation in a social media post Saturday night.
Dhillon posted a letter from Attorney General Pam Bondi to Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, dated Friday. It said the investigation would focus on whether Moriarty’s office “engages in the illegal consideration of race in its prosecutorial decision-making.”
The letter, released to The Associated Press by the Justice Department on Monday, said the investigation was triggered by a new policy adopted by the county attorney that has come under conservative fire in recent weeks.
That policy, which was leaked to local media last month, says racial disparities harm the community, so prosecutors should consider the “whole person, including their racial identity and age,” as part of their overall analysis.
Moriarty’s office got the Justice Department letter via email on Monday, the county attorney’s spokesperson, Daniel Borgertpoepping, said in a statement.
“Our office will cooperate with any resulting investigation and we’re fully confident our policy complies with the law,” he said.
Moriarty, a former public defender, was elected in 2022 as the Minneapolis area and the country were still reeling from the death of George Floyd, a Black man, under the knee of a white officer. She promised to make police more accountable and change the culture of a prosecutors’ office that she believed had long overemphasized punishment without addressing the root causes of crime.
The federal inquiry will be a “pattern or practice” investigation, Bondi’s letter said. That’s the same kind of probe that the Justice Department conducted of the Minneapolis Police Department following the murder of Floyd nearly five years ago.
That process led to an agreement in January between the Biden administration’s Justice Department and the city on a consent decree to mandate changes to the police department’s training and use-of-force policies that are meant to reduce racial disparities in policing. However, the agreement still requires approval by a federal judge.
After taking office later in January, President Donald Trump’s administration froze civil rights litigation and suggested it may reconsider the Minneapolis agreement and a similar one with Louisville, Kentucky.
Trump took a step further last month when he signed an executive order directing the attorney general to review all ongoing federal consent decrees with law enforcement agencies and “modify, rescind, or move to conclude such measures that unduly impede the performance of law enforcement functions.”
The Justice Department had already asked the court to pause its decision on the Minneapolis agreement while Dhillon reviews the matter. U.S. District Judge Paul Magnuson has given the agency until May 21. Louisville’s consent decree is similarly on hold.
