TaShun Bowden-Lewis, the state's first black public defender, filed a civil rights lawsuit in federal court on Friday alleging she was fired earlier this month in retaliation for her repeated complaints that she was being treated unfairly and discriminatorily because of her race.

The lawsuit names the six members of the Public Defender Services Commission who fired Bowden-Lewis after 18 months of controversy and escalating disciplinary action that ranged from a reprimand to a suspension to dismissal on June 4.

The commission “discriminated against Bowden-Lewis Hospital when it jointly disciplined plaintiff for conduct for which her white predecessors in the office of chief public defender had not been similarly disciplined,” says the lawsuit prepared by Bowden-Lewis attorney and former Bridgeport mayor Thomas Bucci.

The lawsuit has been long awaited. Over the past 18 months, Bowden-Lewis has sent three letters to the commission containing thinly veiled threats of legal action and complaints that her leadership of the agency, which employs lawyers to defend the indigent, is subject to scrutiny because of her black skin.

During the same period, the commission received a highly unusually high number of public complaints about Bowden-Lewis from senior agency lawyers, who complained that she was making management decisions that ran counter to the department's core mission and that anyone who raised concerns about those decisions was accused of racism.

The commission that appointed her as the first black female chief resigned as a group less than a year later after receiving a letter accusing her of racism. The commission the lawsuit targets was appointed last spring and includes two black attorneys, one of whom has been repeatedly recognized by the NAACP, and a Hispanic judge.

The commission's chairman, Richard N. Palmer, a retired state Supreme Court justice, declined to discuss the lawsuit. Bucci could not be reached.

The lawsuit puts events since Bowden-Lewis' appointment two years ago in a blatantly racist context. It describes several of her disputes with the commission, her overstaffing, her expenses and her improper access to Palmer's email correspondence, and claims that all of this shows how she is a victim of discrimination.

She complains that her allegations of discrimination were treated as “workplace misconduct” and that commission members “hid behind the veil of the Connecticut Public Defender Services Commission” and “publicly reprimanded and chastised her for expressing, in good faith, her belief that she was being treated in a racially discriminatory manner.”

She claims that the Commission failed in its duty to respond to her allegations by launching its own investigation.

The lawsuit alleges discrimination on constitutional and statutory grounds. Among other things, Bowden-Lewis claims the commission does not have the legal authority to fire her or even overturn her management decisions.

The authority of the commission members was “a fiction they used to justify their racially discriminatory behavior,” and they hid behind these claims “to justify their overzealous behavior,” the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit references a state law that allows the chief public defender to direct the work of the department and recommend job applicants to the commission. But the lawsuit also cites a section of the law that says the chief public defender needs the commission's approval to hire staff, organize the office and operate it according to commission policies.

According to the lawsuit, Bowden-Lewis' allegations of discrimination are supported by an independent investigation that the commission commissioned from the Hartford law firm Shipman & Goodwin.

The lawsuit alleges that Shipman & Goodwin acknowledged that Bowden-Lewis' “claim that she was a victim of racial and color discrimination was merited.”

Specifically, the law firm said race is “a difficult area to evaluate because race may be an implicit factor in the reactions of at least some witnesses to Ms. Bowden-Lewis' priorities and actions as chief…” It is possible, the Shipman report said, that complaints to the commission about Bowden-Lewis' management decisions could have been racially motivated.

However, the law firm said there were other compelling reasons for the complaints.

“However, we have concluded that the overriding factor that led to such complaints was not Ms. Bowden-Lewis' race, but her lack of clear communication and management skills,” the law firm reported.

“While perhaps legitimate in certain cases, the sheer number of instances in which Ms Bowden-Lewis has used racist comments to imply or outright claim that other staff or members of the Commission are racist because of their legitimate disagreements with their leadership could be classified as bullying and has contributed to an environment in which staff are afraid to raise issues about their leadership for fear of being labelled as racist.”