FEDS GOING OVERBOARD IN PROSECUTING MELTON

I've never been much of a Frank Melton fan. Back in the days when he
was the blunt-speaking broadcaster from Jackson on the chicken dinner
circuit, he was too much of a showboat for my taste.

I never really bought into his shtick. He would forever arrive late
at an event where he was the featured speaker, mesmerize the audience
with his bashing of saggy-pantsed, earring-wearing black males and
those who coddle them, then blow right back out. I always thought he
had way too high an opinion of himself.

Jackson, though, embraced what Melton was peddling and elected him
mayor in 2005 by a landslide, with support coming across the entire
economic and racial spectra.

The experience has been a disaster. Having gotten a taste of playing
cop when he headed up the Bureau of Narcotics, Melton thought he was
elected not only mayor but police chief. He got himself into trouble,
and the city into a swamp of legal problems, by going after the bad
guys, and using as muscle his police bodyguards and an assorted group
of young black males, some of them with their own criminal pasts.

Jackson is having buyer's remorse, and it would be stunning if
Melton's mayoral tenure lasts more than one term.

As erratic as Melton is, though, it's overkill for the U.S. Justice
Department to be dogging him over an incident for which he has
already been acquitted of criminal charges in a state court.

Last week, Melton and his police bodyguards, Marcus Wright and
Michael Recio, were charged with two federal civil rights violations
and a gun offense for the 2006 demolishing of a duplex that Melton
contended was a "crack house."

This tactic by federal prosecutors -- using civil rights laws to get
around the roadblock of double jeopardy -- is nothing new. We saw it
in the 1960s, when the feds prosecuted KKK members and other violent
racists on civil rights violations because local courts in
Mississippi and other Deep South states wouldn't convict them on
murder charges. We saw it in the 1990s, when four Los Angeles cops
were indicted on federal civil rights charges following their
acquittal in state court for the videotaped beating of Rodney King.

It is admirable for the feds to step in and prosecute heinous
offenders when either their state counterparts are weak-kneed or when
the bias of the local jury pool is so glaring that there's no way to
win a conviction in a state court.

Had it not been for the FBI, some of Mississippi's most awful white
supremacists, crooked politicians and, most recently, corrupt trial
lawyers would never have spent a day behind bars.

But it's another matter when the feds get involved simply because
they appear to disagree with the verdict in the state court.

When Melton and the two bodyguards were put on trial in Hinds County
last year on burglary and other related charges, the prosecutors were
not just going through the motions. Then-District Attorney Faye
Peterson would have given her eye teeth to win a conviction. Melton
had been a frequent and public critic of Peterson's crime-fighting
efforts and made no secret that he would work later that year to have
her defeated.

The jury, nevertheless, didn't cooperate with prosecutors. It took a
frontier approach to justice, deciding that Melton's vigilante ways
were less threatening to their neighborhoods than the havoc and
destruction created by the well-armed drug dealers and the miscreants
who surround them. The people in Jackson are a whole lot more
frustrated by the drug trade and its attendant violence than anything
the mayor has ever done.

Did the jury disregard the evidence and the law? Probably
so.

But the miscarriage of justice was not so egregious -- certainly
nothing as unequivocal as the Rodney King beating -- to call for the
feds to try to correct the state jurors' flawed judgment.

There isn't a state acquittal for a violent crime that couldn't be
resurrected by the feds for civil rights violations. When the Justice
Department delves into marginal cases such as Melton's, it reinforces
the perception that its choice of targets can be personal and political.