By JULIA PRESTON
Published: June 7, 2010

The former manager of a kosher slaughterhouse in Iowa that was the site of a 2008 immigration raid was acquitted on Monday of criminal charges that he knowingly employed under-age workers at the plant.



After a five-week trial in state court in Waterloo, Iowa, the jury rejected prosecutors’ arguments that the manager, Sholom Rubashkin, had seen many warning signs that child laborers were working on production lines at the Agriprocessors plant. The jury, after about 12 hours of deliberations, found Mr. Rubashkin not guilty of all 67 charges of child labor violations.

“The key was whether the state had evidence that Mr. Rubashkin actually knew that minors were working in the plant and willfully permitted that condition to exist,â€