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Sholom Rubashkin
Attorneys for the former day-to-day manager at the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville say they have uncovered new documents indicating that the U.S. District Court judge that presided over their client’s case should have recused herself.
Sholom M. Rubashkin, son of company founder A. Aaron Rubashkin, was convicted last year on 86 fraud-related charges and sentenced in June to 27 years in prison. His legal counsel has now filed a motion for a new trial on grounds that U.S. District Court Chief Justice Linda R. Reade collaborated with federal prosecutors months prior to the immigration enforcement action at the plant that ultimately led to Rubashkin’s arrest.
“The government’s own memoranda show that more than six months before the raid Judge Linda Reade began a series of meetings in which she collaborated with the law-enforcement team that prosecuted the case against Sholom Rubashkin,” said Nathan Lewin, lead appellate counsel for Rubashkin. “Without disclosing to defense counsel her meetings with the U.S. attorney and the support she expressed for the raid, she presided at Mr. Rubashkin’s trial, and then immediately had him imprisoned and sentenced him to two years more in prison than the prosecution requested.”
The documents, according to Lewin, were produced in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Rubashkin’s legal team in February 2009. According to Lewin, the team eventually had to file a suit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in order to receive the documents.
“Under federal law, as authoritatively interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Reade was required to disqualify herself from serving as the judge in Mr. Rubashkin’s trail or, at least, to make full disclosure to the defense lawyers so they could decide whether or not to file a motion for recusal,” Lewin added.
The documents indicate that Reade was meeting with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Iowa in October 2007, that she provided her vacation schedule as the raid on the plant was being planned, and noted that she was “willing to support the operation in any way possible. The documents also show that she participated in a meeting in which the logistics of the raid were discussed, including “numbers of anticipated arrests and prosecutions” and “movement of detainees.”
The enforcement action in May 2008 at the Agriprocessors plant was a major federal undertaking. Most of those detained in the raid were loaded onto buses and brought to the National Cattle Congress, a fairgrounds facility, in Waterloo, which had been rented by federal authorities under the guise of training exercises. The federal court system chose to set up a make-shift courtroom on the fairgrounds, where detainees received their initial court appearances in groups of 10. Reade presided over the appearances by the detainees at the Waterloo facility.
Given the coordination required for the actual enforcement action, the holding of the detainees and the court proceedings, it would unusual if the lead justice for the region was not at least somewhat involved in the planning. But Rubashkin’s team charges that the documents they received also indicated that Sholom Rubashkin was a key focus of the investigation prior to the raid.
In a PowerPoint presentation describing the planned raid, according to Lewin, officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement identified Rubashkin as a company executive and noted “that one more more company officials may have knowledge of criminal conduct on the part of the company and may even be culpable themselves. A separate memo, written by ICE officials prior to the raid, indicated that the agency would “execute a criminal arrest warrant” against a “corporate official.”
It is unknown if Reade viewed the presentation or read the memo, and questions directed to the court and U.S. Attorney’s Office were not answered. Court officials will typically not respond publicly to pending motions.
4:30 p.m. update — Bob Teig, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Iowa said, “We try our cases in court and not in the press.” The office, he noted, will be filing a response to the motion made by Rubashkin’s legal team.
As a part of its motion for a new trial, Rubashkin’s attorneys have also requested that Reade transfer the motion to another judge for a ruling.
If cause is found for a new trial in the case, it won’t be the first time that fault was discovered in the wake of what took place in Postville. In May 2009, a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court found many of the convictions and sentences given to workers detained at the Postville plant were in error.
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