A Civil Rights Professor Discusses the Death of Tyre Nichols | Guest Randolph McLaughlin

Legal Tenzer: Casual Conversations on Noteworthy Legal Topics

In this episode: On January 3, 2023, five Memphis police officers stopped Tyre Nichols for a traffic stop. The officers beat Mr. Nichols, who died three days later. Video cameras caught the incident. Civil Rights Attorney and Professor of Law Randolph McLaughlin of the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University, joins me to discuss the incident, explains what to expect from the prosecution, and shares his experience as a young African American man standing on the receiving end of a police officer's gun.
About our guest: Prior to joining the Pace Law School faculty in 1988, Professor McLaughlin was an attorney associated with Meyer, Suozzi, English & Klein, with whom he did litigation and labor law work. In 1978, he began his legal career at the Center for Constitutional Rights, a civil rights/civil liberties legal organization in New York City. For eight years he worked side by side with the renowned civil rights attorney William Kunstler fighting for the rights of activists and the communities across the country. While there, he was responsible for the management and coordination of important civil rights/civil liberties cases at the trial and appellate levels and he pioneered the development of a legal strategy to redress incidents of racially-motivated violence. In 1982, he won an award of $535,000 for five black women who had been attacked by members of the Chattanooga Ku Klux Klan.

Professor McLaughlin specializes in voting rights litigation. In 1991, after he filed a voting rights challenge to the election of New Rochelle's City Council, the city changed its method of electing council members. On February 20, 1997, Professor McLaughlin won a landmark victory in a voting rights case against the Town of Hempstead, NY. A federal judge ruled that the town-wide method of electing the Town Council was discriminatory and ordered that the system be dismantled.

In 1997, Professor McLaughlin agreed to represent the family of Charles Campbell who had been killed during a dispute over a parking space in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. The shooter, an off-duty New York City police officer, was subsequently convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to a prison term of twenty years to life. Professor McLaughlin filed suit against the shooter, his alleged accomplices, and won a $5 million dollar verdict in federal court.

In 2007, he intervened on behalf of an Hispanic political activist in a voting rights lawsuit brought by the United States Department of Justice against the Village of Port Chester. On January 17, 2008, the district court issued an opinion and found that the Village's at-large election system violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

"I went into teaching in order to expose students to the value and rewards of civil rights practice. While I am a full-time law professor, I also maintain a selective civil rights caseload. Whenever possible I involve students in all aspects of that work. My students have served as active members of a trial team, participating in the writing of briefs and sitting in the courtroom with the other attorneys. I involve the students in all aspects of the case and share with them my strategies as we pursue justice for our clients."