Caw!

As demonstated at Postville, the attorneys at Homeland Security and the Department of Justice have come up with an almost sure-fire method for putting anyone they wish to target in jail for months.

Here they arrested hundreds of putative “illegals” in Postville on legally unfounded felony charges carrying a two year minimum sentence upon conviction, then the DOJ offered a blanket plea agreement in which folks would be coerced to plea to a lesser charge with an agreed mandatory five month jail sentence which judges could not refuse to enforce.

Those refusing the plea offer would be subject to at least five months of detainment, without bail, pending trial.

The really nasty catch was that the plea offer was set to expire in 7 days, 3 days before the prosecution would be required to produce evidence of a crime at the probable cause hearing. So, they were forced to make an immediate choice between five months of jail and at least five months in jail awaiting trial with the danger of a two year minimum sentence if convicted at trial.

According to the court interpreter who wrote this account of Postville, there was no factual basis to support conviction on any of the charges for the majority of detainees, but judges were precluded from examining that because if the Judge found an absence of facts to support the plea, his only recourse was to reject the plea agreement, thus subjecting the detainee to months of jail awaiting trial.

Individual prosecutors were prohibited from changing a single term in the blanket plea agreement by the DOJ.

It appears to this writer that every judge and prosector who participated in this “fast-track” railroad violated the code of professional responsibility and engaged in a conspiracy to deprive the detainees of their constitutional rights. The unchangeable blanket plea agreement is evidence for both.

Bar Association complaints should be filed for disbarment against every participating prosecutor for violation of prosecutorial ethics. A class action suit should be brought against the Justice Department and attorneys for wholesale violation of constitutional rights. We cannot allow this pernicious “fast-track” to illegal detention to continue.

The money itself, which currently surpasses $600 billion, is credited to, and comingled with, the general SSA Trust Fund. SSA actuaries now calculate that illegal workers are currently subsidizing the retirement of legal residents at a rate of $8.9 billion per year, for which the illegal (no-match) workers will never receive benefits.

non pdf link to Dr. Camayd-Freixas’ essay