A couple of weeks ago we filed a Ninth Circuit appeal that demonstrates how a sharp attorney can make a difference where criminal records are involved.\u00a0 \u00a0 Even minor criminal convictions could have serious consequences on an immigration case, after the defendant is finished in the criminal court system.\u00a0 Many criminal-immigration defendants have family living in the U.S. lawfully, and strong emotional\/spiritual\/financial ties.\u00a0 Deportation could mean that a young U.S. citizen boy or girl would be deprived of a father or mother for the remainder of childhood; a very harsh punishment to impose on a defendant\u2019s family for his or her mistake or lack of judgement.<\/p>\n
Therefore, it is important that the immigration laws \u201cget it right\u201d when deciding which people to exclude from the U.S.\u00a0 The immigration laws punish broad categories of criminal conduct with deportation, but the categories are generally described: for example, a \u201cfirearm offense,\u201d or a \u201ccontrolled substance offense.\u201d \u00a0For deportation, the government must prove which specific law was broken.\u00a0 Then the Immigration Judge examines the broken law, as written, to see if it is one described by the immigration categories.\u00a0 This may sound easy, but with fifty different states they have numerous complex laws with many components that could be broken\u2014some parts may fall under the immigration description and some parts may not.<\/p>\n
So how does the government \u201cget it right?\u201d\u00a0 The Judge is allowed to look at the documents in the criminal record and see for which parts of the law the defendant was charged, and whether ultimately he was found guilty of breaking those specific parts, as charged.\u00a0 But a\u00a0nolo contendere<\/em>\u00a0plea can be a different animal because it doesn\u2019t necessarily admit which parts were broken.<\/p>\n This is where the nitty-gritty details make a difference in the hands of an attorney with experience in criminal\/immigration laws.\u00a0 In our client\u2019s case, the government was trying to strip him of his permanent residency and deport him, after he\u2019d been living here for more than 16 years with a citizen wife and 2 citizen children.\u00a0 The government was relying on just two words that appeared in the state criminal record, in the summary of his\u00a0nolo contendere<\/em>\u00a0plea: a reference to \u201cCount 01\u201d of the criminal complaint, which charged our client with a specific crime.<\/p>\n Two words in this document, created during criminal court prosecution, opened up a can of worms down the road for deportation proceedings.\u00a0 Everyone involved in the deportation case had rolled over and assumed that those two words, \u201cCount 01,\u201d were an admission of guilt to breaking the law described by Count 01 of the criminal complaint.\u00a0 And the Immigration Judge determined that the law described in Count 01 was one punishable by deportation.<\/p>\n We took over this case and filed an appeal.\u00a0 In California, a\u00a0nolo contendere<\/em>\u00a0plea does not automatically admit guilt to breaking the specific laws contained in the criminal charging document.\u00a0 Defendants enter a\u00a0nolo contendere<\/em>\u00a0plea when they believe that the government does not have a good case to prove that the specific law, as charged, was broken.\u00a0 In return, the defendant avoids prolonged trial and detention, and avoids a finding that he or she definitely committed criminal acts to break that particular law (this could be important in the future for various legal consequences), but the government still gets a conviction.<\/p>\n A sharp attorney, aware of the immigration consequences, would not have allowed the two words, \u201cCount 01,\u201d to remain in the record without further clarifying language.\u00a0 Now this detail has raised a novel issue, and it could have been avoided with more precaution in criminal court, and more analysis in immigration court.\u00a0 We shall see how the Ninth Circuit addresses this issue; it never has published an opinion yet on the subject but we commonly raise these types of arguments and push for better clarification of the criminal\/immigration intersection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A couple of weeks ago we filed a Ninth Circuit appeal that demonstrates how a sharp attorney can make a difference where criminal records are involved.\u00a0 \u00a0 Even minor criminal convictions could have serious consequences on an immigration case, after the defendant is finished in the criminal court system.\u00a0 Many criminal-immigration defendants have family living […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":878,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-criminal-immigration-issues","category-deportation-removal-detention"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n