Clinton Names Deval Patrick for Civil Rights Post

President Clinton nominated Deval L. Patrick, a Boston lawyer with extensive civil rights experience, on Tuesday to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division--a position that has been vacant for nearly a year.

Conservatives, who led a successful fight against Clinton’s first choice, University of Pennsylvania professor C. Lani Guinier, immediately branded Patrick “a stealth Guinier,” prompting Clinton to question whether they were acting in good faith and to charge that they “don’t give a rip about civil rights.”

Patrick, 37, who like Guinier is black, grew up near one of the poorest public housing projects on Chicago’s South Side. But he won a scholarship to a prestigious prep school and another to Harvard as an undergraduate and worked in Africa as a Rockefeller traveling fellow. He subsequently earned a Harvard law degree.

He served as a clerk for Los Angeles Judge Stephen Reinhardt on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

With those credentials, “he could have had probably any job he wanted with just about any law firm in America,” Atty. Gen. Janet Reno said as she introduced him at a White House ceremony. Instead, she said, he chose to practice civil rights law with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where he represented Death Row inmates and handled extensive voting rights litigation.

For eight years, Patrick has worked for a top Boston law firm, where he has spent nearly a third of his time on pro bono public service cases.

Patrick said that he is “humbled” by the nomination and feels as though he is “standing . . . on the shoulders of those courageous advocates of every type and kind who have had the guts to stand up in some court somewhere and give the Constitution life.”

Clint Bolick, vice president of the conservative Institute for Justice, who led the criticism of Guinier by labeling her “Clinton’s quota queen,” issued a press release only hours before Patrick was formally nominated, saying that he “appears to be a stealth Guinier.”

“He has no paper trail,” he said, referring to Guinier’s extensive and controversial writings, some of which Clinton later disavowed. “But (he) is part of the same pro-quota chorus that produced Guinier.”

Clinton responded to the criticism with unusual bite.

“The truth is that a lot of those people are going to be exposed, because they never believed in the civil rights laws, they never believed in equal opportunity, they never lifted a finger to give anybody of a minority race a chance in this country,” Clinton said.

Carl Stern, the Justice Department’s chief spokesman, said that neither Patrick nor the Administration supports quotas as a means of achieving affirmative action.

“I think the public is getting tired of distortions. Mr. Bolick is committed to gutting the civil rights laws. The fox shouldn’t be choosing who guards the chicken house.”

The responses to criticism of Patrick stood in sharp contrast to the Administration’s less aggressive posture when Guinier was under attack. When Clinton eventually bowed to political pressure and withdrew her nomination, civil rights leaders openly condemned the Administration for failing to support her and for denying her the opportunity to defend and explain her views before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which would have conducted her confirmation hearing.

Clinton’s second choice, District of Columbia Corporate Counsel John Payton, withdrew in December after opposition from the Congressional Black Caucus over his failure to vote in local elections and his apparent unfamiliarity with a major voting rights case.

This time, Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), former chairman of the caucus, praised Patrick as an “outstanding choice” and said that “his combination of credentials and life experience will be a boon to the (Justice) department.”

Clinton’s failure to fill the post has been viewed by critics as a failure to convert campaign pledges into action and has contributed to the appearance of disarray at the department, where Deputy Atty. Gen. Philip B. Heymann unexpectedly resigned Thursday, citing differences of style and chemistry with Reno.

An announcement of Heymann’s successor could come by the end of the week, Administration sources said. The choices appear to include Charles F. C. Ruff, a former Watergate prosecutor and Justice Department official who was Reno’s first choice for the job; Pentagon general counsel Jamie Gorelick, who helped guide Reno’s nomination through the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Ronald K. Noble, assistant Treasury secretary for enforcement.

Clinton, a supporter of capital punishment, acknowledged at the White House ceremony that he disagrees with an argument Patrick helped advance to the Supreme Court that the death penalty should be struck down as racially discriminatory.

Reno also opposes the death penalty, although she has pledged to enforce it.

Patrick litigated two cases with Guinier when both worked for the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People. They had discussed the possibility of his nomination to the post, according to sources who know them both. Guinier was said to have expressed concern over the possibility that her friend would be “brutalized” by the confirmation process but hoped that he would take the job.