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Pennsylvania police officers, including the police chief of Shenandoah, Pa., abandoned their duty to uphold the law and instead aided and abetted the teenagers who brutally attacked Luis Ramirez. We welcome the federal indictments of these officers and those responsible for beating a man to death for little other reason than because he was Latino.

Corrupt police officers helped defendants charged with the hateful murder of Ramírez. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) says they deliberately undermined an investigation and fair process. This outrageous misconduct resonates with a shameful past we thought this country had left behind: Mississippi-is-burning justice, in which local officers were complicit in the lynchings of blacks.

In 2008, Ramirez was beaten in Shenandoah by a gang of white teenagers who left him foaming at the mouth. The medical examiner ruled that his death was a homicide caused by blunt force trauma to the head. A witness said she heard the attackers spewing ethnic slurs, like “f-ing spic.” Yet, the only attackers who have been tried thus far, Derrick Donchak and Brandon Piekarsky, were acquitted by an all-white jury of all serious charges.

The federal charges are stomach-turning. The DOJ lays out the relationships between Shenandoah police officers and the defendants’ families. The police chief was friends with Piekarsky’s mother. A patrolman, Jason Hayes, was dating her.

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