Guilt by Representation: The Senate’s Shameful Vote

By Marc Morial

President & CEO, National Urban League

The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees criminal defendants the right to legal counsel.

At no point does it state that representing counsel shall be penalized for upholding this basic principle.  This certainly was not the case for John Roberts when he defended serial killer John Ferguson, convicted of killing eight people.  In fact, Roberts earned Senate confirmation and became Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

However, punitive voting is precisely what occurred this week when the Senate rejected, 52-47, the nomination of Debo Adegbile to lead the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice – a decision based largely on his work as legal counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal when he worked as a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF).  While Adegbile never represented Abu-Jamal in any of his trials, he worked on legal briefs once the LDF took Abu-Jamal’s appeal based on blatant racial bias in the jury selection and instruction in the trial.  In fact, the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with LDF’s arguments and overturned Abu-Jamal’s death sentence, giving him life imprisonment without parole.

Adegbile is highly-regarded across the legal and civil rights communities. Earlier this year, the National Urban League joined 75 other organizations in a letter of support for his nomination.  At that time, we called him “one of the preeminent civil rights litigators of his generation…a consensus builder…[who] has earned respect and admiration from a bipartisan set of colleagues, lawyers, and leaders…because of his principled and measured approach to issues.”  We wholly stand by that today.

Regardless of how anyone feels about Abu-Jamal, Adegbile upheld the principles and expectations of our justice system and did not deny a defendant the right to competent counsel.

The Senate’s actions, on the other hand, are disappointing and disgraceful, and perhaps worst of all, puncture a precedent-setting hole in the very principles of our nation’s Bill of Rights.