The state’s first Black chief public defender , TaShun Bowden-Lewis, filed a civil rights suit in federal court Friday claiming she was fired earlier this month in retaliation for her repeated complaints that she was treated in an unfair and discriminatory fashion because of her race. The suit names the six members of the Public Defender Services Commission, who fired Bowden-Lewis after 18 months of contention and escalating discipline that rose from a letter of reprimand to suspension to dismissal on June 4. The commission “discriminated against the (Bowden-Lewis) when, acting in concert, they subjected the plaintiff to adverse disciplinary actions for conduct which her Caucasian predecessors in the position of Chief Public Defender had not been likewise disciplined,” according to the suit prepared by Bowden-Lewis lawyer and former Bridgeport Mayor Thomas Bucci.
The suit has been long anticipated. Over the last 18 months, Bowden-Lewis delivered three letters to the commission with thinly veiled threats of lawsuits and complaints that her direction of the agency that employs lawyers to defend the indigent were being micromanaged because she is Black. Over the same period, the commission was receiving a highly unusual number of public complaints about Bowden-Lewis from senior agency lawyers.
They complained that she was making management decisions contrary to the division’s core mission and that anyone who expressed misgivings about those decisions was accused of racis.
