A prominent civil rights attorney wants the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate a Rutherford County prosecutor.
A minority-owned business says Assistant District Attorney John Zimmerman has discriminated against it because of one owner’s race. Now, they want the federal government to find out if there’s a larger pattern.
“The Department of Justice exists to make sure that no citizen is discriminated against, even corporate citizens,” attorney Ben Crump said at a press conference Tuesday morning. “They want to make sure that their business is not infringed upon because it is a minority-owned business.”
The Black owner of one bail bonding company said Zimmerman spread rumors about him to hurt his business. Brian Cole, president of Free At Last Bail Bonding Company, said he has done business in multiple states and has never met the level of opposition he’s faced from Zimmerman.
“He’s defamed me, he’s called my insurance company,” Cole said. “We hope that the Department of Justice can come in and do a brief investigation, because what we see and what we’ve seen is a lot of questionable acts that Mr. Zimmerman has demonstrated towards minority-owned companies.”
Mario Hambrick, who is also Black, said he experienced something similar when he tried to start his own bail business about 15 years ago. He said Zimmerman, who was a prosecutor in Nashville at the time, called him and his partner “thugs” and “punks.” Hambrick said the attorney also asked both the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the FBI to find dirt on them.
“[He] basically called for all these investigations, called for TBI background checks and FBI background checks and basically was upset because he couldn’t find anything on me and my partner’s records,” he said. “So, therefore, he just continued on to searching for whatever he was looking for.”
This isn’t the first time Zimmerman has faced allegations of discrimination. Earlier this year, more than a dozen businesses settled a lawsuit against him and other county officials for $1.3 million, according to The Daily New Journal. The owners, many of whom are Egyptian, said they were wrongfully arrested for selling CBD products, which are legal in the state.
WSMV has also uncovered that several prosecutors, including Davidson County District Attorney Glenn Funk, filed complaints against Zimmerman in 2015 for allegedly making racist comments during a conference.
In a letter, Funk said the prosecutor made “insulting comments” that “encouraged unethical and illegal conduct,” during a presentation about jury selection. Zimmerman, he wrote, told the audience that when he worked in Nashville he used to strike jurors from an affluent ZIP code if cases “involved people from the ‘inner city’ because ‘in Nashville, rich people don’t care about what happens in East Nashville.’ ” Other prosecutors at the conference reportedly accused Zimmerman of saying that “Blacks hate Mexicans.”
And just last week, a Nashville judge threw out a death sentence from a case he prosecuted in the 1980s. Abu-Ali Abdur’Rahman’s attorneys had challenged the outcome of his trial, because they said Zimmerman illegally struck Black people from their Black client’s jury.
Now, Crump, who has represented the families of George Floyd, Michael Brown and multiple other people shot and killed by police, wants the DOJ to open a pattern-or-practice investigation into Zimmerman’s behavior.
Those federal probes typically target discrimination within police departments, not district attorney’s offices. The federal government created a law to allow such investigations in the 1990s, after police beat Rodney King in Los Angeles. However, the statute also allows the DOJ to investigate other law enforcement officials, including prosecutors.
The Rutherford County DA’s office declined to comment on the allegations from Free At Last Bail Bonding Company because their business application is still pending in court. In the district attorney’s objection to their petition to operate in Rutherford County, Zimmerman wrote that it is “not a trustworthy or reliable company” and accused the business of “flagrantly violating the rules for operating” elsewhere in the state.
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