MARK PERRY: Update on Eric Holder and the false information that remains on the DOJ website.

In a speech on August 3, 2009 in Long Beach, CA at a conference sponsored by The University of Minnesota’s Institute on Domestic Violence in the African-American Community, Attorney General Eric Holder made the following claim: “Intimate partner homicide is the leading cause of death for African-American women ages 15 to 45. These statistics are shocking and completely unacceptable.” . . .

In a February 4, 2011 op-ed in USAToday, AEI scholar Christina Hoff-Sommers pointed out that Holder’s statistic on the leading cause of death for African-American women ages 15 to 45 was in fact false. Very false. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) clearly show that the leading causes of death for black women in that age group are cancer, heart disease, unintentional injuries. . . .

In response to Glenn Kessler’s investigation that verified Holder’s claims in 2009 about the leading cause of death for black women were in fact false, DOJ officials promised Kessler and the Washington Post in mid-December that “in the coming days” they would “append a note to the Web pages in question making clear that the claim is not valid.” As of today (January 16, 2014) the false claims remain on the DOJ websites here and here. . . .

Because the source of Eric Holder’s erroneous information has now been traced by the Washington Post to Professor Jacquelyn Campbell and her co-authors, perhaps they can now help correct Holder’s erroneous statement that “intimate partner homicide is the leading cause of death for African-American women ages 15 to 45.” Unfortunately, that false statement has spread so widely over many years that it has been quoted in books, on websites at the University of Minnesota and Harvard University, in articles by the Huffington Post and the Dallas News and on YouTube, among many other examples. To quote and paraphrase Christina Hoff-Sommers, “Victims of intimate violence are best served by the truth. Eric Holder should correct his department’s website immediately and Dr. Jacquelyn Campbell should help correct and stop the spread of this false information.”