Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison during a news conference in St. Paul, Minn., on Wednesday.
Photo: John Autey/Associated PressMinnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has long railed against a criminal-justice system that he says refuses to punish police officers for unjustified killings of African-American men.
In the latest high-profile case of alleged police brutality, the progressive activist is now the one in charge.
The state’s top law-enforcement officer is taking command of prosecution of charges arising from the death of George Floyd, getting the go-ahead from Gov. Tim Walz to take the reins from Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman.
It’s unusual for a state attorney general to take over a local criminal prosecution.
But fatal encounters between law enforcement and unarmed citizens have put more attention on the independence of local prosecutors who work closely with police.
In New York, protests surrounding the 2014 police killing of Eric Garner on Staten Island led Gov. Andrew Cuomo to give the state’s attorney general more prosecutorial authority to investigate police killings of civilians when there are questions about the use of force.
Mr. Ellison has previously assailed the outcomes of other high-profile and racially fraught investigations of police officers that never led to indictments.
“In too many recent cases—from Eric Garner to Tamir Rice to Mike Brown—grand juries have refused to indict in officer-involved killings,” he tweeted in December 2015.
Inspired by the writings of Malcolm X and Saul Alinsky and stories about Clarence Darrow and radical lawyer William Kunstler, Mr. Ellison turned to activism during his college years at Wayne State University when he converted to Islam.
After graduating from University of Minnesota Law School in 1990 and a stint working at a corporate law firm, he worked as a defense lawyer. He has said his time representing drug users and gang members, among others, influenced his worldview.
In a 2014 autobiography, Mr. Ellison wrote about his disillusionment with American criminal justice as a young man, saying the 1992 acquittal of police officers in the Rodney King beating convinced him of the system’s corruption and the need to protest.
By the mid-1990s, he became involved with the Nation of Islam and was one of the organizers of the “Million Man March” led by Louis Farrakhan on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Years later, when vying for a congressional seat, he renounced his associations with Mr. Farrakhan and the leader’s history of anti-Semitic remarks, but still faced questions from political opponents about his ties to the Nation of Islam leader.
He served two terms in the Minnesota Legislature before running for a Minneapolis-based House seat in 2006.
As the first Muslim elected to Congress, Mr. Ellison represented Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District for 12 years—a seat now occupied by Ilhan Omar —and became one of the party’s most influential left-wing voices as a co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
After losing a bid to head the Democratic National Committee in 2017, Mr. Ellison won a contested primary for Minnesota attorney general in 2018. During the general election, the head of the Minneapolis police union, Lt. Bob Kroll, accused the Democrat of being “anti-law enforcement” and denounced his candidacy. Mr. Ellison ended up defeating his Republican challenger by around 100,000 votes.
During an interview with Fox News Sunday, Mr. Ellison said he didn’t support the violent unrest in Minneapolis sparked by the death of Mr. Floyd. But he urged more understanding of the anger behind it. “Let’s look at the roots of that rage and try to address it rather than just pound it down with massive force,” he said. “People are upset for a reason.”
Write to Jacob Gershman at jacob.gershman@wsj.com
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