Patterico's Pontifications

7/22/2007

English-Speaking Defendant on Trial for Raping Seven-Year-Old Gets Free Pass Because Court Could Not Find Interpreter in His Obscure Language

Filed under: Crime,General — Patterico @ 5:08 pm



This is one of the most outrageous decisions I have ever heard about — on several levels.

Charges against a man accused of raping and repeatedly molesting a 7-year-old girl have been dropped because the court took too long to find an interpreter fluent in his native West African language.

Montgomery County Circuit Judge Katherine D. Savage dismissed the nearly three-year-old case against Mahamu Kanneh last week, saying the delays had violated the Liberian immigrant’s right to a speedy trial.

The evidence sounds strong, as multiple “witnesses told police he assaulted the girl multiple times.”

No matter. The courts couldn’t find an interpreter to translate proceedings into “Vai, a tribal language that linguists estimate is spoken by about 100,000 people mostly in Liberia and Sierra Leone.”

Minor point: he probably didn’t need the interpreter anyway.

Prosecutors pointed out that Kanneh attended high school and community college in Montgomery and spoke to detectives in English.

A court-appointed psychiatrist recommended that an interpreter be appointed and judges who handled subsequent hearings heeded that advice.

So the courts didn’t even try to find a qualified interpreter? No they tried. Lord, how they tried:

But officials could not find a competent interpreter of Vai who would stay.

The first interpreter stormed out of the courtroom in tears because she found the facts of the case disturbing.

Advantage: defendant.

A second interpreter was rejected for faulty work. A third Vai interpreter was located, but at the last minute, that person had to tend to a family emergency.

In recent weeks court officials had found a suitable interpreter, but Savage ruled that too much time had already passed.

Sure, he was out of custody. But rules are rules. It’s only fair — don’t you think??

UPDATE: Yes, that is sarcasm.

Rosa Brooks: Al Qaeda Got “Lucky” on 9/11

Filed under: Dog Trainer,General,Morons,Terrorism — Patterico @ 12:02 am



We all knew that, with the passage of time, 9/11 would merit nothing more than a shrug of the shoulders from our leftist intellectual elite.

We’ve arrived at that point. The L.A. Times‘s Rosa Brooks tells us that Al Qaeda was really no big deal in 2001. They just got lucky:

In 2001, administration stalwarts suggested that Osama bin Laden rivaled Hitler in the danger he posed to U.S. security and insisted that Al Qaeda’s power was so great that nothing short of a “global war on terror” was required.

At that time, most experts say, this description of Al Qaeda simply wasn’t true. It was little more than an obscure group of extremist thugs, well financed and intermittently lethal but relatively limited in their global and regional political pull. On 9/11, they got lucky — but despite the unexpected success of their attack on the U.S., they did not pose an imminent mortal threat to the nation.

Badger 6 begs to differ:

Al Qaeda is a highly organized and discipline military organization, four large commercial aircraft are not commandeered in mid-flight, three of which are then redirected into buildings, due to luck. For the events of that day to be successful, a high degree of coordination and security was required. To dismiss that as pure luck is pure folly and naive.

Folly? Naivete? From the L.A. Times??

Say it ain’t so!

Laura Ingraham Interviews Johnny Sutton

Filed under: Crime,General,Immigration — Patterico @ 12:00 am



I finally got around to listening to this hour-long interview that Laura Ingraham did with Johnny Sutton. She did a lot of shouting at him, but I thought he held his own quite well, and sounded like a straightforward and decent guy. The more I listen to the guy, the more I like him.

I still think he has a hard time defending the length of the sentence.


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