Thread: Immigrants’ Speedy Trials After Raid Become Issue

Immigrants’ Speedy Trials After Raid Become Issue

By JULIA PRESTON

Immigration and criminal defense lawyers were stunned in May when nearly 300 illegal immigrant workers who had been detained in a raid at an Iowa meatpacking plant were convicted on criminal charges and sentenced to prison — all in just four days.

Now the legal blueprint for those extraordinarily swift proceedings has come to light, and it is raising questions about the close collaboration in the months before the raid between the federal court in Iowa and the prosecutors who pressed the charges.

The blueprint is a 117-page compendium of scripts, laying out step by step the hearings that would come after the raid at the Agriprocessors plant in Postville, Iowa, the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out at a single workplace.

The United States attorney’s office in Iowa said the documents, recently posted on the Web site of the American Civil Liberties Union, were not binding and were prepared to assist defense lawyers with a sudden crush of defendants. Most of the immigrants pleaded guilty to document fraud and were sentenced to five months in prison. Some Iowa lawyers said they did find the scripts helpful.

But some critics of the proceedings say the documents suggest that the court had endorsed the prosecutors’ drive to obtain the guilty pleas even before the hearings began. The scripts included a model of the guilty pleas that prosecutors planned to offer as well as statements to be made by the judges when they accepted the pleas and handed down sentences.

“This was the Postville prosecution guilty-plea machine,â€

OH PLEASE. NONE OF THESE PEOPLE HAVE DOCUMENTS. THEY ARE ALL ILLEGAL. THEY ARE GUILTY OTHERWISE THEY WOULD PRODUCE DOCUMENTS PROVING THEY ARE HERE LEGALLY. THEY GOT A SPEEDY TRIAL...SO WHAT? IN THIS COUNTRY WE HAVE A RIGHT TO A SPEEDY TRIAL. ITS NOT LIKE THERE IS ANY QUESTION OF THEIR GUILT.

What more should we, the people (taxpayers) of America have to provide other than a speedy trial. A monitoring device does sound good; have them pay $6.00 a day for the device, though. Americans are fedddup!