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Shortly after the Civil War, in 1871, Congress approved a law to curb the Ku Klux Klan. One of its provisions made it a crime for government officials to abuse an individual's constitutional rights "under color of law." Reporter Kevin Johnson noted that the small number of federal prosecutions brought under this law had increased from FY 2001 to 2007. But scanning TRAC data he also noticed that prosecutors refused to bring any charges in more than 90% of such cases they received. His front-page article was twined with a second one about the government's attempt to deal with a particularly abusive brutality case in Milwaukee.
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