by José de la Isla
HOUSTON – On the same day The New York Times broke the story about the cushy relationship on between prosecutors and judges in Iowa, a Law & Order TV rerun was playing on the TNT cable channel with a similar plot.
In the half-hour TV drama, Sam Waterston playing executive DA Jack McCoy lays out the case against a defendant with a long drunk-driving history after killing three people with an automobile. The legal question was how guilty was he — capital murder (meaning life) or first degree manslaughter (five to 15)? It all boiled down to how the evidence was gathered, whether some witness tampering took place. Did McCoy violate legal ethics, and did a politically ambitious judge try to tip the balance of justice?
Meanwhile in real life, Times reporter Julia Preston revealed on Aug. 9 how criminal defense lawyers were stunned in May when nearly 300 undocumented immigrants were convicted on criminal charges and promptly sentenced to prison in just four days after a raid at the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa.
It turns out that in the months before the raid a 117-page blueprint was prepared showing step-by-step how the hearings would be conducted.
The American Civil Liberties Union has posted the document online which prosecutors say was non-binding but instead was prepared to assist defense lawyers with a sudden crush of defendants. Most of the immigrants — mainly from Guatemala — pleaded guilty. They come from a place where the presumption in court is guilty, and they were unlikely to understand the jurisprudence paradigm shift in courts here without sufficient consultation and explanation from counsel.
They were promptly arrested, arraigned, and sentencing to five months in prison in a makeshift courtroom at the National Cattle Congress fairgrounds in Waterloo, Iowa.
Some Iowa lawyers had no complaint. However, others said the blueprint script suggests the court had endorsed the prosecutors’ drive to obtain guilty pleas before the hearings began. Not only did the scripts included a model guilty plea the prosecutors planned to offer but also statements which were to be made by the judges when they accepted the pleas and handed down sentences. It all sounded like made-for-TV justice — but without cameras.
The American Immigration Lawyers Association protested that workers were denied meetings with lawyers and their immigration law claims were put aside in favor of the unusual plea agreements. Criminal defense lawyers warned of due process violations.
If the immigrants tried to defend themselves, they were threatened with a minimum of two years in prison. With their hands and feet shackled, the defendants were filed into the makeshift courtrooms in groups of ten, where one by one, through a translator, they plead guilty to having taken jobs using fraudulent Social Security cards or immigration documents. They were then moved into another courtroom for sentencing.
Bush appointee Linda R. Reade, chief judge of Iowa´s Northern District, oversaw the hearings, for which she had begun preparations in December. It´s unknown if or how much she might have contributed to the blueprint. However, Judge Reade should have known better, as she taught trial techniques at Drake University Law School in Iowa and at Emory Law School in Georgia in the 1990s.
Rockne Cole, a defense lawyer who refused to represent any of the arrested immigrants and “walked out in disgust,” requested a congressional subcommittee to look into the raid and its legal proceedings, claiming the hearings were organized to produce guilty pleas in favor of the prosecution Cole told the NYT that he was most astonished that Chief Judge Reade apparently had already ratified the deals before a lawyer even talked to his or her client.
In the TV case, McCoy lets the defendant plead to the lesser charge in order to keep the judge from getting his way and corrupting the process and introducing bias. The congressional committee should see this episode to understand that what was really on trial was the possible corruption of our jurisprudence by a judge.
[José de la Isla writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service. He is author of The Rise of Hispanic Political Power (Archer Books). Email him at joseisla3@yahoo.com]. ©2008
