ATLANTA — There was a modicum of relief across Atlanta when District Attorney Paul L. Howard Jr. of Fulton County went on national television two weeks ago and announced criminal charges, including murder, against a white police officer who had fatally shot a Black man.
Many residents praised Mr. Howard, who nearly a quarter-century ago became the first African-American elected to a district attorney post in Georgia. L. Chris Stewart, a lawyer for the family of the victim, Rayshard Brooks, spoke at the same news conference of Mr. Howard’s “courageousness” in swiftly bringing charges against the officer, Garrett Rolfe, and his partner at the scene, who was charged with aggravated assault.
But others considered the move tainted by political considerations.
Days before he signaled his intent to prosecute the officers, Mr. Howard had been forced into a runoff election with a former subordinate who received the most votes in the Democratic primary. Though well known to voters, Mr. Howard, 68, has found himself dogged by allegations of sexual harassment and a Georgia Bureau of Investigation criminal inquiry into a six-figure sum he received from a nonprofit group founded to prevent youth violence.
At a candidates’ forum in June, Mr. Howard was also criticized by social justice advocates over his handling of other cases, including the police killing of a Black man in January 2017 that has languished on his desk.
According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Mr. Howard said at the forum that his office had planned to present that case, plus two others in which Black men were killed by the police, but had been derailed by the coronavirus, which suspended grand jury activity.
The worry that Mr. Howard might be playing politics extends beyond optics, with some experts saying it could hinder his office’s ability to successfully prosecute what will likely be among the most closely watched trials in the nation.
“That’s going to give powerful ammunition to the defense to argue that this is an improperly motivated prosecution,” said Clark D. Cunningham, a law professor at Georgia State University and director of the National Institute for Teaching Ethics and Professionalism.
It remains to be seen whether Mr. Howard’s handling of the Brooks case will serve as a dramatic conclusion to a long public career, or simply as another chapter in the story of a prosecutor whose time in office has been fraught with tensions between crime-fighting and criminal justice reform, and between support for law enforcement and policing the police.
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“It’s not an easy road to travel,” said Angelo Fuster, a Democratic political consultant in Atlanta who helped Mr. Howard with his original 1996 run for office. “But I think it can be complicated by personal interest in re-election.”
The day after Mr. Howard announced the charges, Representative Doug Collins, a Republican running for a Senate seat in Georgia, called on Chris Carr, the state’s Republican attorney general, to dismiss Mr. Howard and instead appoint a special prosecutor.
“Our founders intended for our justice system to be blind — blind to race, blind to socioeconomic status, and blind to politics,” Mr. Collins said in a statement.
Mr. Collins noted that the G.B.I. had announced, shortly after Mr. Howard’s news conference, that it had not completed its own examination of the shooting. The agency also said that Mr. Howard had not consulted any of its investigators before he trotted out photographic evidence to outline the case against the police officers. Mr. Rolfe faces 11 counts, including murder, and Devin Brosnan faces three counts, including aggravated assault.
Mr. Carr has said that he cannot replace Mr. Howard unless the district attorney is disqualified by a judge or disqualifies himself.
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Mr. Howard did not respond to an interview request, but he has said he has received death threats since announcing the charges. He has previously refuted the sexual harassment charges against him, and has said he committed no crime in accepting payment from the nonprofit group.
And in a recent interview with ABC News, Mr. Howard denied that politics played a role in his decision to charge the officers, noting other cases in which he has gone after the police.
“Every case that we’ve handled,” he said, “that’s what they’ve said, it’s political, every case.”
Yet Mr. Howard has also earned some good will among city residents who were eager to see charges brought against the officers, who were summoned to a Wendy’s parking lot late on June 12 after an employee called 911 to report that Mr. Brooks had fallen asleep while in the drive-through.
In a mostly cordial encounter that was captured on video, Mr. Brooks, 27, answered the officers’ questions. But then, after failing sobriety tests, Mr. Brooks, who was on probation and faced a return to jail, began fighting with the officers as Mr. Rolfe tried to handcuff him. Mr. Brooks hit Officer Brosnan, grabbed his Taser and fired it while running away. Mr. Rolfe fired his own Taser and then his department-issued handgun three times, striking Mr. Brooks twice in the back.
Mr. Rolfe, who was fired from the Atlanta Police Department, was granted a $500,000 bond on Monday, though prosecutors from Mr. Howard’s office argued he should be denied bond. Mr. Rolfe will have to wear an ankle monitor and be on a daily curfew from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. Officer Brosnan, who remains on administrative duty, was released on a $50,000 bond.
Gerald Griggs, the first vice president of the N.A.A.C.P.’s Atlanta chapter, praised Mr. Howard’s decision to bring charges. Although he said he did not always agree with Mr. Howard, he called him “a hard-charging prosecutor that seeks justice where he believes that justice lies.”
The Brooks case was not the first in recent weeks in which Mr. Howard has been accused of charging police officers because of political motivations.
In the days before Mr. Brooks was killed, as demonstrators angered over the death of George Floyd poured into the streets of Atlanta, two college students driving in the midst of protests were Tased and violently dragged from their car by Atlanta police officers. Mr. Howard criminally charged six officers in connection with that encounter, which was filmed and posted on social media.
The city’s police chief, Erika Shields, who later resigned in the wake of Mr. Brooks’s death, had fired two officers for the May 30 attack on the college students, but she criticized Mr. Howard’s leveling of criminal charges, saying the officers had been “swept up in the tsunami of political jockeying during an election year.”
Noah H. Pines, a lawyer representing Mr. Rolfe who worked in Mr. Howard’s office for three months, said he was alarmed by the prosecutor’s decision to outline in considerable detail his case against the officers at the June 17 news conference.
He said that Mr. Howard shared information that was inaccurate, such as that Officer Brosnan had agreed to be a state’s witness, which his lawyers later denied. Mr. Pines disputed Mr. Howard’s allegation that Mr. Rolfe kicked Mr. Brooks after shooting him. He also said it was inappropriate for Mr. Howard to be flanked by lawyers representing Mr. Brooks’s family at the news conference.
“I think it directly impacts his right to a fair trial,” Mr. Pines said of his client.
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The primary election was hard news for Mr. Howard, who had become used to running unopposed. His former chief deputy, Fani Willis, running on the message “integrity matters,” won 42 percent of the vote to his 35 percent. The runoff is scheduled for Aug. 11, and the winner will not face an opponent in November’s general election.
Mr. Howard, by his telling, was drawn to the law to correct racial injustice. He has said he was called to the profession after going to a criminal trial as a teenager and hearing the prosecutor, defense lawyer and defendant use racial slurs.
A native of tiny Midville, Ga., Mr. Howard attended Morehouse College, the traditionally Black, all-male Atlanta institution steeped in the civil rights tradition, and then law school across town at Emory University.
He was elected as an innovator, promising to create special units to work on sex crimes and child abuse. Over the years, he has touted reductions in crime in the Atlanta area that have generally tracked with overall U.S. trends.
This year, Mr. Howard has attacked Ms. Willis for her endorsement from the Atlanta police union, saying without substantiation that it amounted to “a deal” not to prosecute police officers, according to The Journal-Constitution.
In an interview, Ms. Willis declined to say whether Mr. Rolfe and Officer Brosnan should have been charged. Commenting was inappropriate, she said, because she had not seen the complete G.B.I. investigation.
Rick Rojas contributed reporting.
