This is simply, relatively, very, very mild treatment. People are occasionally dying in custody, sometimes with little to no record; people are detained for many hours, without access to food or restroom facilities, or simple information about what is happening, why they are being held, and such; other people are being held for weeks with notice to any one; and thus again this instance is simply minor in comparison to the treatment some people are receiving.

As for David’s point– as usual, not so simple. As usual, I know people on the far left who are substantively in agreement with David. We also have a border situation, and need practical solutions.

I recall friends, who were US citizens, being stopped at LAX during the seventies. Their experience was no where near what happened in this case. However, as far as anyone could speculate the only reason was male with long hair, possibly in combination with getting off a flight from somewhere south of the border.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann

I agree for the reasons I mention above. Miami International is also pretty awful.

And Will, while not in every case, certainly mandatory minimums make sense for a LARGE volume of crimes. Especially in a post-Booker world, you really don’t want crazy judges letting off very, very serious drug, gun, sex, or violent offenders with no jail time, which, unfortunately, would happen in at least some cases, without much hope on appeal for the gov’t.

Now you know why I oppose capitol punishment. This case was all about luck… like so much is in our legal system. This person was unlucky to get a police officer who arrested him for such a thing… then this person got lucky with the judge… then unlucky at customs. We should not trust a system like this to make a decision that kills an American. You will hear all kinds of arguments about how we should have a death penalty, but that it should apply only to extreme cases- the system simply does not work that way.

I once spent a weekend in a North Adams jail for driving with a two week expired license. No kidding. They locked me up on a Friday evening and could not bail me out until the bailiff arrived Monday morning. Then of course… I had to appear in court- North Adams court- when I was going to school in Boston. I appeared, they gave me a continuance so I appeared again- by the time the judge dropped the charges- I had paid a bailiff 25 dollars, a court few, a witness fee, and lost several days of school and work.

That is the way these things can go… regardless of immigration status. The system is largely about luck. There are ways in which you can tip the odds by acting correctly to authority figures, but in the end, luck comes into play.

Here’s the conversation between border agents:

Agent 1: Wow, it would save us a lot of time and resources if we didn’t have to deal with these uselessly petty offenders.
Agent 2: Sure would.

…

Of course, no one has the will to do anything about it because a. it would probably mean less jobs for border agents, b. they wouldn’t get another cent on their paychecks for going through the hassle of implementing actual change.

Of course, whether or not you agree with government healthcare plans is a question of the lesser of two evils. It’s never quite that black and white.

Also, another example of how broken the system is: we’re now in a world where justice is handed out more by DAs than ny judges, thanks to mandatory minimums.

A startling petition arrived at the New York City Bar Association in October 2008, signed by 100 men, all locked up without criminal charges in the middle of Manhattan.

In vivid if flawed English, it described cramped, filthy quarters where dire medical needs were ignored and hungry prisoners were put to work for $1 a day.

The petitioners were among 250 detainees imprisoned in an immigration jail that few New Yorkers know exists. Above a post office, on the fourth floor of a federal office building in Greenwich Village, the Varick Street Detention Facility takes in 11,000 men a year, most of them longtime New Yorkers facing deportation without a lawyer.

System of Neglect

Three months later, at 2 in the morning on June 27, 2006, the native of Ghana collapsed in Cell 206 at the Otay Mesa immigrant detention center outside San Diego. His cellmate hit the intercom button, yelling to guards that Osman was on the floor suffering from chest pains. A guard peered through the window into the dim cell and saw the detainee on the ground, but did not go in. Instead, he called a clinic nurse to find out whether Osman had any medical problems.

When the nurse opened the file and found it blank, she decided there was no emergency and said Osman needed to fill out a sick call request. The guard went on a lunch break.

The cellmate yelled again. Another guard came by, looked in and called the nurse. This time she wanted Osman brought to the clinic. Forty minutes passed before guards brought a wheelchair to his cell. By then it was too late: Osman was barely alive when paramedics reached him. He soon died.

His body, clothed only in dark pants and socks, was left on a breezeway for two hours, an airway tube sticking out of his mouth. Osman was 34.

The next day, an autopsy determined that he had died because his heart had suddenly stopped, confidential medical records show. Two physicians who reviewed his case for The Washington Post said he might have lived had he received timely treatment, perhaps as basic as an aspirin.

It is very, very, very unusual, but then again, your circumstance is very unusual, criminal records can be expunged (I’ve only seen this in the conviction context, but I can’t imagine why it would be inapplicable in an arrest context as well — in fact the arguments are better). This is usually something within the discretionary power of a judge / court, although you’d have to consult a local counsel in Berkshire County to get a sense of whether this is a realistic possibility there. Considering that your case was dimissed (from the sound of it) with no repercussions, and given that this probably should have just been a citation offense in the first place, and considering the amount of hastle this is causing you, I think you have a good argument for expungement. Again, courts are loathe to do this generally for obvious reasons (bad precedent) but I think it is worth hiring counsel and giving it a shot. There may be some immigration-law approach to resolve the problem as well, but that I know less about. Still, you can’t be the only person faced with this situation.

Regarding David’s point, the private sector hasn’t exactly done a bang up job of late. So far as I remember, it wasn’t the government that sent our economy into a tailspin by engaging in ridiculous amounts of speculative risk. I’ve worked for the federal gov’t, state gov’t, and the private sector, and I’ve seen nothing inherently beurocratic endemic to the federal gov’t. In fact, at least in the law enforcement arena, I think the federal gov’t does a damn good job, probably better than the private sector would, at a far lower cost for certain. So I really don’t think you can generalize across gov’t functions in that way. Health care may, or may not, prove to be bad idea at the Federal level, but the federal gov’t does some things well, and some things poorly, and you can’t generalize and say anything gov’t run is inherently bad relative to the private sector.

For plenty of Americans who have documentation and those who don’t, that fear is how they feel on a daily basis whether it’s walking to work, school, or church. The feeling of not being free in the land of the brave.

We have gotten to a point where it is guilty before proven innocent, and it is tearing families apart.

As for your particular circumstance, I would always carry government identification, in case there is an overzealous officer or agent who wants to make an example. If you lived in Phoeniz, AZ, for example, you’d be subject to Sheriff Arpaio’s mass roundups of US citizens and immigrants alike.

2) This is a perfect example of why folks like me are against Obama’s health care plans. The larger a role that the federal government plays in X, the worse that X will be. Think that the immigration inspectors in the above story are horrible? You’re right! Now, imagine them running your local hospital . . .

So why is the law allowing me to be punished repeatedly for a crime that I have already been punished for, and more importantly, why is so much valuable time and money being wasted because of a seemingly
simple technical inadequacy?

Because that is the way that unaccountably bureaucracies work, always and everywhere.