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.
Thanks for that explanation.
Where is the Judge now?