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President Obama’s choice to head the civil rights division of the department of justice has been described as a “trailblazer” who has been at the forefront of the movement to end mass incarceration in the US, and has had almost unparalleled success in working across the aisle despite the partisan gridlock in Washington.
Vanita Gupta, 39, the deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, was appointed on Wednesday as temporary head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, a role to which she is expected to be nominated by the end of the year.
The position will throw her into the thick of such volatile issues as the civil rights investigation into police behavior in Ferguson, Missouri, and the battle over voting rights that is raging across the country ahead of the midterm elections next month.
Over more than a decade working on the front line of civil rights law, Gupta has proven herself to be a rare, if not unique, animal: a lawyer who is full-throated in her advocacy of progressive values yet has gained the respect and trust of conservatives, who would normally be considered her political enemies.
The Washington Post, which broke the news of her appointment, carried glowing testimonials from such unlikely quarters as Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, and the former head of the National Rifle Association David Keene who said: “Vanita is someone who works with everyone.”
According to the Washington Post, the attorney general Eric Holder introduced Gupta to her new DOJ staff on Wednesday, saying that “even as she has done trailblazing work as a civil rights lawyer, Vanita is also known as a unifier and consensus builder.”
The ACLU’s executive director, Anthony Romero, told the Guardian that Gupta was “the kind of leader who comes along once a generation. Largely through her efforts, we’ve seen a realignment that has brought together conservatives and progressives over criminal justice reform.”
If that bipartisan support can be carried over into the US Senate, Gupta should enjoy a relatively comfortable confirmation process and avoid the unhappy experience of the previous nominee, Debo Adegbile. He was put up for the civil rights post last year, only to be rejected by the Senate in March after powerful police unions objected on grounds that he had represented on appeal the former Black Panther member Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted in 1982 of murdering a police officer.
An accusation commonly leveled at criminal justice reformers is that they are insufficiently empathetic to the victims of crime. That cannot be said of Gupta, because she is herself a victim. In 1992, her paternal grandmother was murdered at home in Sahibabad, India. She wrote in the New York Times of that unsolved killing: “The anguish it caused my family will never fade away.”
But that experience, when she was 17, has not held her back from being a leading voice for an end to America’s addiction with incarcerating people, particularly African American men. Her passionate advocacy of that cause has led her into other progressive causes, notably reform of the country’s harsh drug laws and support for legalization of marijuana.
Gupta cut her teeth at the NAACP legal defence fund in 2001. A rookie straight out of New York University’s school of law, she nonetheless took on powerful coalitions in Texas to expose the faulty convictions of 38 black men in the small Texas town of Tulia. The case became a textbook example of civil rights justice.
In her new job at the Justice Department, Gupta would be flung into the hornet’s nest of voting rights at a time when controversial voter-ID laws, that have erected hurdles to democratic participation mainly in southern states, have been spawned in several states. She will also have the thorny investigation into police conduct in Ferguson related to the death of the black teenager Michael Brown and the public protests that followed.
Romero said that her role would be all the more important now that the attorney general, Eric Holder, is stepping down. “It’s clear that Holder’s legacy is in criminal justice, so his selection of Vanita signals he wants her to carry on that legacy to fruition in the last two years of the Obama administration.”
- The headline and standfirst on this article were amended on 16/10/2014 to correct errors saying that Vanita Gupta was to be nominated as attorney general
