The widow of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, who was killed in 1981, says she is "outraged" that President Barack Obama has nominated the killer's attorney to head the Justice Department Civil Rights Division.
Debo Adegbile currently works as senior counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, but has been nominated to take over the Civil Rights Division after the post was vacated by Thomas Perez, who is now serving as secretary of Labor.
Adegbile worked as an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund when he argued that the jury in Mumia Abu-Jamal's trial was selected along racial lines and not properly instructed. As a result of that argument, the Abu-Jamal killer was given a reduced sentence of life in prison rather than death for his conviction in the killing of Faulkner.
"To have a man who defended a murderer, someone who murdered a police officer with premeditation and malice, is a radical, is a Black Panther, and to give him an appointment, to nominate him to the Department of Justice, I mean it's a disgrace," Maureen Faulkner said Wednesday on Fox News.
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nomination has sparked controversy over what some conservatives call the "radical" positions Adegbile has taken throughout his career.
According to Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, Adegbile once "filed a brief in the Supreme Court in a case in which he said it was okay for universities to discriminate against white students because of their race in college admissions and said employers should not be able to do criminal background checks."
Columnist and author John Fund told Newsmax that Adegbile's nomination is another example of the radicalization of the Justice Department. Fund also said Perez's appointment to head Civil Right Division had also been a radical move as well, given that Perez had "fought against all voter integrity laws, including photo ID laws."
"His successor, Debo Adegbile, is just made out of the same cloth as he is," Fund said. "If you thought Thomas Perez was a radical, we may even go beyond his normal behavior with this new guy."
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