Justice Dept. reverses course, will assist prosecution in Park Police killing of Bijan Ghaisar

Link to tweet

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/06/15/justice-department-assists-ghaisar-case/


The change of heart could provide a big boost to Fairfax County prosecutors, and lawyers for the Virginia attorney general who’ve joined the case, who will now have access to the agents who investigated the November 2017 shooting of Ghaisar by Officers Lucas Vinyard and Alejandro Amaya. After a short pursuit on the George Washington Memorial Parkway, during which Ghaisar stopped and then pulled away twice, Ghaisar drove into a neighborhood in the Fort Hunt area and stopped a third time. When he started to roll away again, a video shows, Vinyard and Amaya fired 10 times, killing the unarmed Ghaisar.

The FBI handled the case because the Park Police are federal officers. After a two-year investigation, the Justice Department’s civil rights division decided in November 2019 not to charge Vinyard and Amaya. Then in February 2020, Assistant Attorney General Eric S. Dreiband informed Fairfax prosecutors that the FBI would not be allowed to cooperate with a local investigation because the department might be defending the officers, and that would be a conflict of interest.

Fairfax prosecutors pursued the case anyway, without the agents who performed the investigation or all of their case files. And last October a special grand jury indicted Vinyard, 39, and Amaya, 41, on charges of involuntary manslaughter and reckless use of a firearm. The officers’ lawyers then moved the case to federal court in Alexandria, where federal law allows federal agents to be tried. Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring assigned some of his attorneys to join Fairfax in the case, at the request of Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano.

After the Trump administration gave way to the Biden administration, Herring and Descano wrote a letter last month to the newly installed attorney general, asking the Justice Department to reconsider both the decision not to charge the officers and the decision not to cooperate with Fairfax. They said that in-car camera footage captured by a Fairfax police cruiser showed “yet another young person of color being killed by law enforcement,” and that “the most significant impediment” to obtaining justice in the case was “the Trump Administration.”

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