No Good Deed…
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
There’s an old saying among criminal prosecutors:
“If you want to put someone in a box you’ve got to think outside the box.”
Federal prosecutors tried to think way outside the box last year when they arrested an Arizona State University instructor whose crime was to give food and water to immigrants who had crossed the Arizona border.
Last month at the conclusion of Scott Warren’s trial, jurors scratched their heads and said they just didn’t get it. ’Twas a hung jury. Now the government vows to try him again.
Warren and two of the immigrants he helped were arrested during a raid upon a building long known to Border Patrol agents as a humanitarian way station run by a group called No Más Muertes (No More Deaths). The group offers people food, water, beds, and clean clothes. It was established to try to curb the more than eight thousand deaths of desperate people that have occurred in the Sonoran Desert migration corridor, near the town of Ajo, since the 1990s.
No Más Muertes doesn’t smuggle people, doesn’t do anything to help them get into the United States. Doesn’t do anything but save lives. Warren’s arrest came within hours after the organization showed video evidence of Border Patrol agents destroying life-saving water stations and confiscating blankets.
The government charged Warren with illegally harboring the two immigrants and conspiracy to smuggle them into the United States. He faced twenty years in prison.
This was completely out-of-the box thinking, considering the immigrants were already in the United States when Warren met them. The agents testified that Warren made wavy gestures with his arms and hands in their presence that indicated he was “pointing to known points of interest.”
Very creative. Very out of the box. But in the jury box, out of their minds.
The government is dropping the conspiracy charge, but plans to retry Warren in November for his effrontery in providing food, water, beds, and clean clothes. Hey, in Donald Trump’s America, we don’t even give that stuff to the illegal kids.
Since Warren’s arrest, eighty-eight more bodies have been recovered from the Ajo corridor.
Ajo, indeed.
4 August 2019 @ 5:47 pm
It’s pretty ridiculous for the government to have brought the charges in the first place and pretty heartless for destroying water jugs. If a stranger or neighbor asks me for a glass of water because they are thirsty, I’m inclined to give it to them regardless of their immigration status. It’s unfortunate that our government doesn’t seem to be committed to addressing the underlying problem of violence in Central America. There ought to be an all out effort to assist local law enforcement and arrest the drug traffickers. I realize that some cities have corrupt law enforcement but that’s an issue to be dealt with as well. In the past, America has wrongly sided with individuals who began corrupt themselves and formed death squads. Neutrality in politics is key as well as recruiting individuals who have immigrated to assist in kicking out the bad guys.