Do you trust him?

Do you trust him to prosecute your case?

If you have been following the news you will have heard about a hate crime that the feds are prosecuting in Iowa where a man murdered a transgender high school student last year.

Aiding Transgender Case, Sessions Defies His Image on Civil Rights
New York Times
By Matt Apuzzo
October 15, 2017

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has dispatched an experienced federal hate crimes lawyer to Iowa to help prosecute a man charged with murdering a transgender high school student last year, a highly unusual move that officials said was personally initiated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

In taking the step, Mr. Sessions, a staunch conservative, is sending a signal that he has made a priority of fighting violence against transgender people individually, even as he has rolled back legal protections for them collectively.

The Justice Department rarely assigns its lawyers to serve as local prosecutors, and only in cases in which they can provide expertise in areas that the federal government views as significant. By doing so in this instance, Mr. Sessions put the weight of the government behind a small-city murder case with overtones of gender identity and sexuality.

So this is unusual in two ways, the first in that the Department of Justice is prosecuting the case and the second thing is that they are doing at all because of all the rhetoric that the U.S. Attorney General has made about us not being covered under Title VII and Title IX.
The difference might be because of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Hate crime law that specifically spells out protection for us.

 “This is just one example of the attorney general’s commitment to enforcing the laws enacted by Congress and to protecting the civil rights of all individuals,” said Devin O’Malley, a spokesman for the Justice Department.
[…]
But he has also brought several hate crime cases, including one against a man accused of burning a mosque. He condemned white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Va., far more forcefully than the president. And he has vowed tough action against hate crimes, speaking aggressively in ways that few of his most ardent opponents could have predicted. He has tied enforcement of those crimes to his tough stance against violence, a cornerstone of his policies as attorney general.

But still for me I would be a little leery and wonder how much effort the federal government will put into the case.

And I’m not the only one to think that, in an article in Pink News,

Trump’s Attorney General ‘cynically exploiting’ murder of trans teenBy Nick Duffy
16th October 2017

Trump’s Attorney General has been accused of cynically exploiting a transphobic murder for good PR.

16-year-old Kedarie Johnson was shot to death last year in Iowa.

Jorge “Lumni” Sanders-Galvez was charged with first-degree murder over the shooting, but the state’s hate crime laws do not protect LGBT people, meaning the case could not be treated as a hate crime.

However, Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions has intervened in the case – putting out a release declaring that he would pursue hate crime charges federally.
[…]
Pro-LGBT law firm Lambda Legal accused Sessions of a “cynical publicity stunt” by seeking positive coverage for simply following the precedent set by the Obama administration, at the same time he works to undermine civil rights protections for transgender workers.

Lambda Legal Director of Strategy Sharon McGowan said: “Of course it is important and right that the Department of Justice assist in bringing to justice the murderer of Kedarie/Kandicee Johnson, one of the far too many transgender people, and especially transgender people of color, targeted in the ongoing lethal epidemic of hate violence.

“But it is the height of cynicism for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to use this – frankly rare – instance of civil rights enforcement under his tenure to deflect from the current department’s sustained opposition to its historic mission.

Maybe the Attorney General Jeff Sessions sees hate crime differently than discrimination; hopefully that is the case.