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Issues Highlighted in Story:
Gang Targets
LPR with “Aggravated Felony”
Immigration Consequences of criminal plea bargains
Inept Lawyers
US Citizen Family
Person’s Background Before Detention
The case of Cea is a sad commentary on the methods by which California justice has been replaced by political mandate in the panacea surrounding the gang violence problem. Cea was a 20-year old legal resident born in El Salvador and the member of a loosely-organized group of teenage Latino taggers in San Diego known as the Paradise Hills Locos. After serving a probation sentence for a public property graffiti misdemeanor, he and his fellow Locos came under close scrutiny of the San Diego gang unit. Cea was goaded into a challenge by a white neighbor, a former gang-banger considered by the SDPD gang unit as a prime example of a “reformed” gang member. Shortly after shouting obscenities at the ex-ganger and his father while holding a two foot stick in front of the grandfather’s home in his parent’s neighborhood, Cea and two other Locos were picked up by the gang unit.
Circumstances Leading to Detention/Immigration Proceedings
The San Diego D. A. wanted Cea charged with two of three strikes of felony threat with intent to terrorize. After consultation with Cea’s parents, his counsel, an experienced gang-crime P.D. struck a plea bargain for one count of felony assault, even though no assault took place. Cea served 6 months and was given 3 years probation. Six months after his release, he was picked up in a car with fellow Locos on a gang unit stake out. At his probation violation hearing Cea was represented by an inexperienced and overworked P.D. This hearing and his subsequent jail time, taking the full sentence out to 365 days, was done without the knowledge of his step father. The father reentered the picture when he was contacted on June of 2004 when Cea was picked up at his girlfriend’s house, where he had resided for 2 years with her and their child, by INS (now ICE.)
The step-father brought in an experienced legal team of criminal and immigration lawyers. A two-step process was instituted. The appeal for relief from mandatory permanent deportation was pursued through the immigration court under the terror convention, with a well-researched and documented presentation of the torture and murder of returning gang members in El Salvador under the “mano duro” policy. Despite the overwhelming case, the political sensitivities of the times, in which street gangs are routinely equated with political terrorists, failed to provide any relief in the ICE system. The case is currently stalled in the U. S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The other legal process was a reduction of sentence by one day to avoid mandatory deportation in Superior Court. The legal team assembled by the step-father first initiated a rehearing in front of the sentencing judge. He admonished Cea’s sentencing P. D. and defense lawyers in general for not knowing and advising their clients and the court on the immigration consequences of criminal sentencing. He failed to provide relief in Cea’s case for one reason – he was the same judge who was himself admonished and overruled by the notorious 4th District Court of Appeals in San Diego for his sentence reduction on the now-famous Borja case. He indicated any relief would have to come from the 4th – he would not cross them again.
The case was continued into the 4th with predictable results (relying almost solely on their own precedents in opinion). Even before their denial of relief became official, Cea’s step-father contacted the noted criminal attorney Norton Tooby to prepare an attorney malfeasance case in front of the California Supreme Court, based on the P. D. admission of her failure to advise (under oath) in a hearing to move for resentencing in Superior Court, and the sentencing judge’s admission that he didn’t know how he would have ruled in sentencing in the probation-revocation hearing if he had been advised of the consequences at the time of the original hearing.
Conclusion
Despite a well-researched case with dozens of relative precedents cited, by a vote of 5 to 2 the conservative high court voted not to hear the appeal. The family is now considering whether there is value in filing a habeas corpus case in U. S. District Court in San Diego. Unfortunately that court is stacked with Reagan and Bush conservative appointees and the timetable to get the case to the 9th is one of years. Cea has grown weary after two years of Federal detention and may “sign himself out” before the habeas or the immigration cases make their way before the San Francisco-based appeals court.
