Laura Coates - Just Pursuit: A Black Prosecutors Fight for Fairness

Just Pursuit

A Black Prosecutors Fight for Fairness

Laura Coates

Former Federal Prosecutor United States Department of Justice

While the stories in this book are based on my experiences, names, locations, and identifying details have been changed. Conversations and dialogue in the book are based solely on my recollection and are not intended to represent verbatim transcripts.

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Copyright 2022 by Laura Coates

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition January 2022

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Interior design by Lewelin Polanco

Jacket design by Christopher Lin

Jacket art by Robyvannucci/Getty Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Coates, Laura Gayle, author.

Title: Just pursuit : a black prosecutors fight for fairness / Laura Coates.

Description: New York : Simon & Schuster, [2022]

Identifiers: LCCN 2021041619 (print) | LCCN 2021041620 (ebook) | ISBN 9781982173760 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781982173784 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Coates, Laura Gayle. | African American public prosecutors--United States--Biography. | Discrimination in criminal justice administration--United States.

Classification: LCC KF373.C585 A3 2022 (print) | LCC KF373.C585 (ebook) | DDC 340.092 [B]--dc23/eng/20211004

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021041619

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021041620

ISBN 978-1-9821-7376-0

ISBN 978-1-9821-7378-4 (ebook)

To my children, Adrian and Sydney. If you are never more than you are today, to me you were always enough.

The pursuit of justice creates injustice.

Before I became a prosecutor, I never imagined that could be true. I thought that the job would be an uncomplicated act of patriotism and that justice was what happened when a person was fairly tried and convicted for their crime.

For years, I stood inside a courtroom, representing the people of the United States. I witnessed firsthand how our just pursuits caused collateral damage in ways I couldnt have imagined when I answered my calling to leave private practice as a civil litigator and join the Department of Justice.

My time at Justice began as a trial attorney in its Civil Rights Division. As a child, I knew the stories of Ruby Bridges and the Freedom Riders better than the tales of Dr. Seuss. My mother grew up in a segregated North Carolina, only migrating north when her parents found workher mother as a domestic worker and her father, a butler and chauffeurfor some of the wealthiest White families in the Northeast. These families were the namesake of industry leaderscompanies that I later happened to represent while working for large law firms. My father spent most of his childhood in foster care, and, although he was raised in a relatively integrated Massachusetts, he was still a Black boy in 1950s America.

In spite of their humble beginnings, my parents propelled themselves to becoming among the first generation in their families to not only go to college but also earn advanced degrees. My parents paths crossed in western Massachusetts, when they were students at neighboring Smith and Amherst Colleges, each only one of a relative handful of Black students at their respective schools. They met just two years after Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, when the fight for equality was far from over. They spoke often of the housing discrimination they had experienced while raising my two older sisters and me, and I watched the economic struggles faced by my father while trying to build a dental practice in a country where financing eluded Black people. While laws were in place, the nations conviction for equity never seemed to catch up. I was taught to understand the civil rights era not as finite but as a movement that we were all duty-bound to keep in motion.

Joining the Civil Rights Division in their work to enforce the Voting Rights Act was in service of that duty. The pride I felt working for the DOJ was immeasurable, but the bureaucracy was unbearable. Unsurprisingly, lobbyists and elected officials at the state and federal levels were particularly interested in our voting rights work, and would often interfere, rendering an investigation futile. I needed a reprieve from the paperwork. I thought being in trial would help, but federal trials in the enforcement of voting rights were few and far between.

One of my Black colleagues told me about a program he had participated in early in his career that allowed DOJ attorneys with few trial opportunities to go on temporary detail to a U.S. Attorneys office in Washington, D.C. He always spoke so glowingly about his experience, regaling me with hilarious stories of courtroom antics and theatrics. My request to participate was repeatedly denied, however, since the program wasnt readily available to voting rights lawyers, so I applied to work at the United States Attorneys office directly.

When I received my offer, I headed to my colleagues office for his congratulations. Instead, his normally jovial mood darkened when I told him that it was not a temporary six-month detail but a permanent position with a four-year commitment.

He closed the door, saying, Two words, Coates: human misery. He counted each word on his fingers. I dont know how to describe it other than to say that youre not going to be able to get used to that type of human misery every day. There is nothing you can really do about it either. It just keeps coming.

I was shocked. As a prosecutor, I assumed he would have been the only one in the courtroom who actually could have done something about the misery. Isnt that what was meant by justice?

Look, all I can tell you is be careful. You gotta protect yourself. Youre better off staying here at Main Justice, he said, distinguishing our work from that of United States Attorneys across the country. Its a lot to deal with.

I felt apprehensive as I watched him close his eyes in remembrance. But I wasnt leaving the Department of Justice, I told myself, just working in a different capacity. I assumed it would be similar enough and that my work as a federal prosecutor in a criminal courtroom would be held in the same high regard as my work within the Civil Rights Division. I chalked up his admonishment to an assumption that he lacked what I clearly believed I had: fortitude.

In fact, the transition from enforcing civil rights legislation to criminal prosecution represented a seismic shift in how others perceived me, and even how I perceived myself. I had been a trusted champion of people who looked like me. But now, I was often distrusted as an agent of a system that disproportionately filled prisons with people who looked like me.