A longtime Justice Department official who worked as an investigator of civil rights violations is now leading Maryland’s investigations into deaths after encounters with police.

Officials with the state Attorney General Anthony Brown’s office confirmed this week that Forrest Christian has taken over as the chief of the office’s Independent Investigations Division.

Christian fills a vacancy since October when the unit’s leadership resigned after one of its cases was thrown out in court.

Christian joined the federal Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in 2006 and worked on prosecutions across the country, including the charging and convictions of 16 Western Maryland corrections officers in 2013 for beating an inmate, and more recently, the beating death of Tyre Nichols in Tennessee.

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His arrival comes during an exodus of career attorneys from the Department of Justice and in particular its Civil Rights Division under the Trump administration. The American Bar Association Journal reported in November that “the vast majority of the 600 employees” in the civil rights section had left “despite its chief, Harmeet K. Dhillon, publicly touting the flood of applications she has been receiving.”

The Maryland Attorney General’s Office gained exclusive authority in 2023 to prosecute cases in which people die after interactions with police. The attorney general’s new power was won over the objections at the time of almost all of Maryland’s local prosecutors, who had previously exercised authority on such cases. The move also gave greater power to its independent investigations division created in 2021.

The statewide office has come under criticism from some families of victims for failing to bring charges against police in cases involving their loved ones’ deaths. Records show officers have been charged in two of the 40 cases to come through the attorney general’s office since its division acquired the new review authority.

During his tenure at the U.S. Justice Department, Christian was involved in several cases in Maryland. He was involved in the prosecution of three Baltimore Police officers in 2009 for the beating of a teenager, and the 2013 case against corrections officers at the Roxbury Correctional Institution.

That year he also prosecuted a Prince George’s County corrections officer who pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in an inmate’s death, and a Frederick County corrections officer who was convicted of obstructing justice and destroying evidence of an inmate assault.

Christian’s predecessor in the Maryland Attorney General’s Office resigned shortly after an Anne Arundel County judge accused the prosecutor of potentially tainting a case with impermissible evidence. As a result, the judge threw out charges that the state unit brought against two county officers accused of misconduct during a fatal 2023 police pursuit in Pasadena.