Cobb: Leo Terrell

October 26, 2004

Leo Terrell

When I met Leo Terrell he was over at Lucy Florence for one of Ofari's meetings in the spring of this year. One of the subjects for discussion was the recent flap over the failed prosecution of an Inglewood police officer in a hood slamming incident. You may recall the collective gasp heard around the mediasphere when millions of mindless negroes didn't riot after the not guilty verdict.

Leo was nonplussed. He used to have a very large civil rights practice. Now he has scaled down and taken few cases. He told me that there are a lot of hacks in the civil rights game, it's more complicated than it ever was and there weren't very many attorneys who really knew what they were doing.

These are interesting comments in retrospect, having found this from the WSJ

The NAACP claims to be a champion of diversity, but its tolerance apparently doesn't extend to its own members who think for themselves. Attorney Leo Terrell learned that recently when he spoke out in support of Carolyn Kuhl, one of President Bush's beleaguered nominees for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The head of the NAACP's Washington office called and ordered him to cease and desist, so yesterday Mr. Terrell resigned from the "civil-rights" group rather than be muzzled.

Mr. Terrell is a California attorney who has donated many hours of work to the NAACP, representing litigants and participating in seminars on discrimination. Mr. Terrell, who is black, has been outspoken in his support of Judge Kuhl, who sits on the California Superior Court in Los Angeles and before whom he appeared in 1999.

"I found that Judge Kuhl was fair, impartial, competent and at all times extremely professional," he wrote in a May 23, 2001, letter to fellow Californian and fellow Democrat, Senator Barbara Boxer. Mr. Terrell repeated those points to us yesterday, adding that the NAACP is buying in to "phony allegations that she is hostile to civil rights."

We'd add that the once great civil-rights group is also playing political enforcer for a hyper-partisan Senate minority. Nominated two years ago, Judge Kuhl is widely expected to soon join Miguel Estrada, Priscilla Owen and William Pryor on the Democrats' filibuster list of judges denied a Senate vote

I never got into the battles over judgeships and I think the President and Republicans are over-reacting toward 'judicial activism' for the simple political expedient of placating the right to life right. But this is an interesting blip.

Posted by mbowen at October 26, 2004 07:54 AM

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