Chief Judge Linda R. Reade - US District Court | Northern District of Iowa
Posted on 12/22/2017 5:14:14 AM PST by Texas Fossil
US rabbinical organization The Coalition for Jewish Values welcomed news that US President Donald Trump had commuted the sentence of Sholom Rubashkin, former head of the country’s largest kosher meat-processing company, who had been sentenced to 27 years in prison for fraud and money laundering.
snip
Rubashkin is a 57-year-old father of 10 children. He previously ran the Iowa headquarters of a family business that was the country’s largest kosher meat-processing company. In 2009, he was convicted of bank fraud and later sentenced to 27 years in prison.
He was charged with defaulting on loans after his funds were frozen during a federal investigation into child labor violations that he was ultimately acquitted of, and immigration-related charges that the prosecution eventually declined to pursue.
(Excerpt) Read more at israelnationalnews.com ...
2. Doesn't vacate the conviction.
3. He's served 8 years of the 27 year sentence.
4. Substantial restitution obligation remains.
I vaguely remember this from late night tv.
So he was acquitted of child labor law violations, not prosecuted for immigration violations but convicted of bank fraud because the FedGov froze his bank accounts?
IIRC the tv show made him look like a Jewish Al Capone.
He was charged with defaulting on loans after his funds were frozen during a federal investigation into child labor violations that he was ultimately acquitted of, and immigration-related charges that the prosecution eventually declined to pursue.
Only after the trial ended did it come to light that Sholom Rubashkin’s judge, Linda R. Reade, had cooperated completely with, and was effectively an important member of, the prosecution.
A mass of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) memoranda and emails were eventually adduced to show that starting more than a year before the military-scale descent on the Agriprocessors plant, Judge Reade started meeting with prosecutors to plan the attack on Mr. Rubashkin. In the ensuing year, she repeatedly met with prosecutors, was involved in many aspects of the case, and was even referred to in one ICE email as a “stakeholder” in the case.
Judge Reade did not disclose her involvement in the prosecution and did not follow clear guidelines required her recusal on the trial itself. Instead she sat through the trial and the sentencing hearings, and then strained the guidelines and even the prosecution’s requested sentence and gave Mr. Rubashkin a staggering 27-year sentence for a first-time, non-violent commercial offense designed exclusively to save his business and its employees. There is no modern American precedent for such severity.
Yes. Clearly Excessive.
I’m in process of posting an article that explains the case in detail:
107 former Justice officials think this case was handled unjustly. DOJ must act. (December 26, 2016)
The Rubashkin Case: A Mockery of Justice
by Conrad Black August 28, 2013
http://www.conradmblack.com/160/the-rubashkin-case-a-mockery-of-justice
As cases bubble up almost every week illustrating the Gonzo-draconian constant miscarriage of the U.S. justice system, the Sholom Rubashkin case has become particularly notorious. Sholom Rubashkin underwent rabbinical training and was a Jewish educator very active in many charities and universally regarded among his acquaintances as a man of great generosity and unblemished ethics. He and his wife have been married nearly 30 years and have raised 10 children. His father, Aaron Rubashkin, bought a derelict plant in Postville, Iowa, and turned it into a kosher slaughterhouse called Agriprocessors Inc., and his son, Sholom, as well as several siblings, joined him in the management as the business grew to employ over 1,000 people.
Sholom Rubashkin’s legal travails arose on two fronts: first, on the financial front. The business was financed with a conventional line of credit from First Bank Business Capital Inc., a subsidiary of St. Louis-based First Bank. The line was secured by an assignment of Agriprocessors’ inventory and receivables, with a right to draw up to 50 per cent of the book value of inventories and 85 per cent of the quantum of outstanding receivables, percentages that were realistically well secured on the company’s history of sales and receivables collection. Every day the company controller reported the current balances of the pledged assets to the bank, and cash as it came in was regularly deposited in an affiliated bank.
In 2008, nine years after these banking arrangements were made, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency staged a brigade-sized raid by 600 agents, with helicopter accompaniment, on the Agriprocessors plant and arrested 389 allegedly undocumented and mainly Hispanic workers. This naturally had a negative impact on the company’s business, but banking arrangements continued for five months until the loan was called in October 2008. A month later, Agriprocessors filed for bankruptcy protection, five days after Sholom Rubashkin was arrested on a complaint based on alleged immigration-related offenses.
It was at this point that the rabid dementia so pandemic among American prosecutors began to erupt. There were an unheard of seven superseding indictments, including the first ever prosecution under the 90-year-old Packers and Stockyards Act, for paying a cattle dealer eleven days late. Following his second indictment, Mr. Rubashkin was detained for 76 days because he was Jewish and the prosecutors were concerned that he might flee the United States for Israel to take advantage of that country’s right of return. This flourish caught on infectiously with other prosecutors around the country, and it has been insistently protested by a wide alliance of Jewish and other organizations as clear sectarian discrimination.
The financial case against Mr. Rubashkin was based on allegations that when business became difficult, he forged some invoices to exaggerate receivables, and sent some incoming cash to cover trade payables in preference to paying down the lender. There was no suggestion that he pocketed a cent for himself, but he was apparently guilty of a relatively minor commercial fraud which did not in itself cost the lender and assisted in keeping the business going. However, prosecutiamania now possessed the local authorities, and the financial prosecution was reinforced by the second half of the pincers operation, a preposterous 9,311 counts of child labour. This helped sink the business and put almost everyone out of work, but almost all the charges were dropped on the eve of trial and the rest were thrown out by the jurors. This entire onslaught on the subject of child labour was completely spurious.
Only after the trial ended did it come to light that Sholom Rubashkin’s judge, Linda R. Reade, had cooperated completely with, and was effectively an important member of, the prosecution.
A herniating mass of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) memoranda and emails were eventually adduced to show that starting more than a year before the military-scale descent on the Agriprocessors plant, Judge Reade started meeting with prosecutors to plan the attack on Mr. Rubashkin. In the ensuing year, she repeatedly met with prosecutors, was involved in many aspects of the case, and was even referred to in one ICE email as a “stakeholder” in the case.
Judge Reade did not disclose her involvement in the prosecution and did not follow clear guidelines that I believe required her recusal on the trial itself. Instead she sat through the trial and the sentencing hearings, and then strained the guidelines and even the prosecution’s requested sentence and gave Mr. Rubashkin a staggering 27-year sentence for a first-time, non-violent commercial offense designed exclusively to save his business and its employees, and of which there was no victim. There is no modern American precedent for such severity.
This case has understandably caused widespread outrage in legal circles in the United States, as has the judge’s apparent bias and her dragging American justice into disrepute, if that is still possible, by being an active member of the prosecution as the case was being put together and then imposing a pitiless prosecution on the facts and on any questions of proportionality or mercy for a widely admired and generous member of the community.
The sentence, which may well effectively be a life sentence for an offense that does not normally carry remotely as heavy a penalty, by a scandalously compromised and biased judge, has been strenuously protested by 75 law professors and former prosecutors, 51 U.S. congressmen, six U.S. senators, 86 attorneys general, U.S. attorneys, and federal judges, including former attorneys general of the United States Ed Meese and Dick Thornburgh and FBI directors William Sessions and Louis Freeh. Scores of thousands of people have attended rallies for Mr. Rubashkin, 52,000 people signed a petition for mercy on his behalf sent to the White House, three million dollars has been raised and donated pro bono to pay for his legal defense, and Attorney General Holder was questioned closely about the case and agreed to look into it when he appeared before the House Judiciary Committee on May 3, 2011.
This is unfortunately not a particularly unusual phenomenon, but is a glaring case of the judge just being a member of the prosecution and of the workings of the American kangaroo system that secures guilty verdicts in 99.5 per cent of cases, 97 per cent without trials, and has created a carceral state whose prisons bulge with the innocent and the over-sentenced. Even scores of people who have served prominently in that system are shocked by this mockery of justice and it will be a virtual self-judgment that the United States is not now in any relevant sense a society of laws at all in criminal matters if this result, which would appal Draco himself, is allowed to stand.
© 2017 Conrad Black
Thanks for that explanation.
Where is the Judge now?
Chief Judge Linda R. Reade - US District Court | Northern District of Iowa
Judge Linda R. Reade - US District Court
Appointed by George W. Bush
Hillary Clinton’s long lost sister?
Rubashkin Case
Judge Reade’s first widely publicized case was the trial and sentencing of kosher slaughterhouse operator Sholom Rubashkin.[2] Judge Reade’s 27-year sentence which exceeded the prosecutors 25 year request,[3] received responses from many prominent politicians and received national attention.
After the conviction, records were obtained that showed Reade was meeting secretly with prosecutors for ten months before the raid on Rubashkin’s plant.[4] Reade maintained that the meetings were only to prepare the courts for a case of such large magnitude. The 8th circuit of Appeals upheld the ruling, Judge Reade was scheduled to sit with two of the appellate judges (over other cases) on the same day just before her conduct was scheduled to be heard.[4]
A total of 86 former US Attorneys General, federal judges, and prosecutors wrote a letter to the United States Supreme Court denouncing Reade’s ruling,[5] however the Supreme Court declined to review it.
Forty-five members of Congress have written to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to ask questions about Reade’s handling of the case.
Her husband also owned stock at the time in two of the largest federal prisons in the United States, and also purchased more stock in prisons 5 days before a large raid on the kosher operator began.
Ethics experts say these investments were inappropriate and may have violated the Code of Conduct for United States Judges.[6] Due to separation of powers, the White House declined to comment on a petition with 52,226 online signatures asking it to investigate Judge Reade’s handling of this case.[7]
On December 20, 2017, after having served eight years of his 27-year sentence, U.S. President Donald Trump commuted Rubashkin’s sentence.[8]
A statement from the White House noted that “[a] bipartisan group of more than 100 former high-ranking and distinguished Department of Justice (DOJ) officials, prosecutors, judges, and legal scholars [had] expressed concerns about the evidentiary proceedings in Mr. Rubashkin’s case and the severity of his sentence,” and further noted that more than 30 Members of Congress had written letters expressing support for a review of Rubashkin’s case.[9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_R._Reade
Clear explanation of the case:
107 former Justice officials think this case was handled unjustly. DOJ must act. (December 26, 2016)
Discussion on FR:
https://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3615979/posts
Barf.
I will not defend his choice on that one.
I thought conservative conventional wisdom was to prosecute employers who employ illegal aliens; to enforce existing law. I wonder why he was not prosecuted for this?
Even if it was, Trump is a negotiator. I would first look to see what we have traded for this decision.
This is highly unusual for Trump. Unless there was some kind of deal going on.
Maybe since this guy has been locked up, Israel hasn’t been getting a major source of food ? Who knows. It’s not like Trump to just go and release people.
Imagine Warren Jeffs if Romney got elected.
reason?
107 former Justice officials think this case was handled unjustly. DOJ must act. (December 26, 2016)
Oh, I read that some parts of the case weren’t quite sound, but didn’t know it was this bad.
Thanks for the heads-up !
Thanks for the history.
One seriously dirty judge.
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