The Maryland Attorney General’s Office announced the hiring Monday of a former Department of Justice attorney to investigate killings by police in the office’s newly created independent investigations unit, according to a media release.
Dana Mulhauser, who worked in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division for 12 years until 2019, most recently served as the founding chief of the Conviction and Incident Review Unit in the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. The St. Louis unit was tasked with reviewing police shootings and prosecuting all cases involving excessive force and police misconduct.
During Mulhauser’s time with the Justice Department, she investigated and prosecuted police misconduct, hate crimes and human trafficking cases throughout the country, Attorney General Brian Frosh’s office said in a release. She investigated cases such as the first-ever excessive force prosecution of corrections officers at Mississippi’s Parchman prison and one of the largest labor trafficking prosecutions in history involving a ring in Ohio that forced Guatemalan teens to work at chicken farms, Frosh’s office said.
“Dana brings a wealth of experience leading complex federal cases centering around law-enforcement misconduct,” said Frosh, a Democrat, in the release.
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“Her sense of fairness, ability to lead a team of investigators and prosecutors, and commitment to transparency makes her the ideal person to lead the Unit,” he said. “We look forward to Dana joining our team.”
Mulhauser’s position was created as part of a series of police reforms passed this year by the Maryland General Assembly, which established an independent investigative unit for police misconduct within the state attorney general’s office. She will make just over $141,000 a year, according to the attorney general’s office
The unit is tasked with investigating all alleged or potential police-involved deaths of civilians, and to provide a report containing detailed investigative findings to the state’s attorney of the county in which the incident occurred.
“I have devoted my career to investigating excessive-force cases because I believe that they are among the most crucial tests of our values and commitments to each other,” Mulhauser said in a statement. “I am honored to join the effort to put Maryland’s new police reforms into practice, and I look forward to helping build a statewide system that will examine fatal incidents with rigor and impartiality.”