Editor, The Smithfield Times:

Outgoing Attorney General Mark Herring has just shown why he was voted out of office. He is the type who will stoop to using skewed statistics to fabricate evidence as the basis for a lawsuit against the Town of Windsor.

His evidence used the African American and Caucasian populations of the Town of Windsor and Isle of Wight County to compare how many African American versus Caucasian drivers were stopped, ticketed and searched. The problem with using these numbers is that the great majority of drivers stopped in the Town of Windsor are not residents of the town or county. They are passing through on Route 460, a major travel highway.

A 2019 Virginia Department of Highways and Transportation study shows that approximately 1.4 million vehicles a year pass through the Town of Windsor. The numbers in the lawsuit went back 14 months, so to have honest evidence for a lawsuit the demographics of all of these millions of drivers would have to be compared and that is impossible to know.

He is obviously taking this totally political and race-baiting action to hopefully benefit himself in some future political run and to place incoming Attorney General Jason Miyares in a difficult position. I predict he will fail because once the actual facts and numbers are examined, anyone can determine there is absolutely no basis for this abuse of the law and this frivolous lawsuit will be dismissed.

I just hope that the Town of Windsor stands firm and makes this dishonest soon-to-be-former attorney general’s office pay its defense cost.

 

Volpe Boykin

Carrsville