The shocking legal blueprint for those extraordinarily 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,” said Lucas Guttentag, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project of the A.C.L.U. “The entire process seemed to presume and be designed for fast-track guilty pleas.”
One defense lawyer who received the scripts from prosecutors on the day of the raid said he became convinced that the hearings had been organized to produce guilty pleas for the prosecution. As a result, the lawyer, Rockne Cole, declined to represent any of the arrested immigrants and “walked out in disgust,” he wrote in a letter to a Congressional subcommittee that is scrutinizing the raid and the legal proceedings that followed. Cole wrote that he was most dismayed to see that the scripts specified the particular plea agreements that would be offered to the defendants. “What I found most astonishing,” he wrote, “is that apparently Chief Judge Reade had already ratified these deals prior to one lawyer even talking to his or her client.”
Preparations for the hearings were overseen by Linda R. Reade, the chief judge of the Northern District of Iowa court, who declined to comment for this article. In an interview in May during the hearings, Judge Reade said she had begun to organize them in December, when she was advised by the immigration authorities to expect a “major law enforcement initiative.”
The hearings were conducted in emergency courtrooms set up in the National Cattle Congress, a fairground in Waterloo. Magistrate judges took guilty pleas from immigrants in groups of 10, then the immigrants were immediately sentenced, five at a time. Only a handful of the workers, mostly illegal immigrants from Guatemala, had prior criminal records. The scripts were compiled before the raid by court officials under the supervision of Robert Phelps, the clerk of court, with input from the office of United States Attorney Matt M. Dummermuth, prosecutors said. Iowa defense lawyers said they were not included in any discussions before the raid.
Mr. Phelps declined to comment. A spokesman for Mr. Dummermuth said the intention was not to push people into pleading guilty. “These documents were there to make sure people were fully advised of their rights and fully understood the consequences of their decisions to plead guilty,” said the spokesman, Bob Teig. Judge Reade, a former federal prosecutor who was nominated by President Bush in 2002, said she was surprised by how many Agriprocessors defendants had pleaded guilty rather than contest the charges. She said she had planned to spend the summer presiding over trials in those cases.
The scripts were presented by prosecutors to about two dozen defense lawyers who were summoned by the court in meetings at the Cedar Rapids courthouse on May 12 while the raid was under way. Several lawyers who were present said prosecutors told them that they might each be assigned more than two dozen clients. The scripts specified that prosecutors would offer a particular type of plea agreement that leaves no discretion to judges to raise or lower sentences. Some defense and immigration lawyers said the inclusion of these plea agreements was a sign of overly close cooperation between the court and prosecutors.
“Here you have a court communicating with one side and not the other about substantive issues,” said Robert R. Rigg, a Drake University law professor who is president of the Iowa Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “The court had bound itself to the agreement before the plea was accepted.” Professor Rigg and other legal scholars said such plea agreements were generally negotiated between prosecutors and defense lawyers after a defendant was charged, and were later approved by the judge. The rule governing the plea bargaining says, “The court must not participate in these agreements.”
Stephanos Bibas, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who is an expert on federal criminal procedure, reviewed the scripts at the request of The New York Times. He said that they contained nothing “legally questionable,” but gave an appearance that raises eyebrows. “It does make it look like the prosecutor and the judge have worked it out ahead of time and made it a fait accompli,” Professor Bibas said. “The defense can think the judge is behind this.”
The Agriprocessors hearings have become a national test case for the Bush administration’s crackdown strategy of bringing criminal charges against illegal immigrants caught in workplace raids. Until recently, most illegal immigrant workers, if they had no prior records, were swiftly deported on civil immigration violations. The hearings were the highest profile use of an expedited procedure, known as fast track, in a court in the American interior. Such fast-track criminal immigration proceedings, on a smaller scale, have become common in the last year in courts near the Mexican border.
Prosecutors and judges said the Iowa court had used scripts in past criminal hearings and had posted them on the court’s Web site. Paul A. Zoss, a magistrate judge who presided in the Agriprocessors hearings, said the court was seeking to help defense lawyers prepare their cases. Iowa defense lawyers said they had seen scripts, but never a complete playbook like the one they were handed in May, describing a guilty plea process from start to finish. But some lawyers who represented immigrant defendants said they found the scripts useful.
“Whether the court prepared them or the prosecution prepared them does not change the fact that they were helpful,” said Christopher Clausen, a lawyer who represented 23 immigrant defendants.
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