This story is from December 3, 2014

Indian-American lawyer is heading Federal probe into Ferguson shooting

A top Indian-American lawyer and civil rights activist is leading a Federal probe into the events in Ferguson, Missouri, in which a Grand Jury chose not to indict a white police officer who shot dead an unarmed black teenager.
Indian-American lawyer is heading Federal probe into Ferguson shooting
WASHINGTON: A top Indian-American lawyer and civil rights activist is leading a Federal probe into the events in Ferguson, Missouri, in which a Grand Jury chose not to indict a white police officer who shot dead an unarmed black teenager.
The Obama administration last month appointed Vanita Gupta to head the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, which is continuing its probe even after the Grand Jury decision.
Gupta, who was formerly a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), was already involved in a Ferguson investigation in that capacity when she was named by Attorney General Eric Holder as the acting civil rights division. The division is now spearheading the Federal probe.
Gupta was also previously associated with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which is now leading the agitation to bring justice to the family of Michael Brown, the slain teenager. Although she has not spoken publicly about Ferguson since her appointment, Gupta had criticized the militarization of the US police previously, a topic that featured prominently on Monday when President Barack Obama called for a meeting in the White House to discuss the Ferguson episode and its fall-out. She is also co-author of a study on the militarization of local police departments.
Gupta, who was born in Philadelphia, has a sterling track record of civil rights activism in support of colored people, particularly their high rate of incarceration. When she was barely into her mid-20s and just couple years out of law school (NYU), she represented 46 African-Americans who had been convicted by an all-white jury in Texas in 2003 on drug dealing charges.
In that unheralded case from Tulia, a small desert town in West Texas, the young Indian-American lawyer won their release after showing that the undercover white agent who filed the charges was, to put it bluntly, a delinquent racist. The prosecution was forced to admit it had made a terrible mistake, and the 46 accused were not only released after four years of incarceration, but Gupta also won them a $5 million settlement by which time the case was being reported nationwide.

She celebrated her win by putting up a sticker on her door from the town's chamber of commerce that read, "Hallelujah, I'm from Tulia." Residents of the town thanked her with a plaque for "doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly in Tulia, Texas."
READ ALSO: ​White cop who shot black kid resigns from police force

(Student activists, demanding justice for the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown, take part in the nationwide 'Hands up, walk out' protest at Washington University.)
Residents of Ferguson may be harboring similar hopes given her previous remarks on the policing issues that have bedeviled the community and is seen in part as being responsible for the shooting of Michael Brown.
"What Ferguson has laid bare is something that communities of color, kind of at the target of the war on drugs, have known for the last several decades, that policing in their communities is often highly militarized," Gupta said in an interview with New York's WNYC radio in August.
"The question will be that once the cameras leave Ferguson, once the Ferguson hashtag is no longer trending on Twitter, is there going to be the political will and resolve to actually address what has been a very alarming situation in local and state police departments around the country? Because there's no question that this has really gone out of control."
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