The Denver Post informs us that the Colorado GOP has decided to propose a constitutional amendment that would bar District Attorneys from offering plea bargains to illegal immigrants that would allow them to avoid immediate deportation.
That's cute isn't it?
Since they are going to get Serious on immigration I'm sure they are offering a funding stream to play for the increased jail beds, jail security, court clerks, judges and prosecutors to handle these new cases. Right?
Oh, no they don't offer anything of the sort. They offer no solutions for how to pay for this in their resolution. They're only interested in applying top down control on our law enforcement and justice system. Offering unfunded mandates and strangling the budgets of local District Attorney's and police departments. All in the name of demagoguery. Just another day for the Colorado GOP.
I thought Republicans believed in local control? I guess that philosophy only applies when it doesn't get in the way of their gratuitous grandstanding.
The Colorado GOP, still no solutions to any of the concerns of average Coloradans.
2 comments:
Even that sort of misses the point. Illegal aliens--documented or undocumented--are always subject to deportation, whether they are charged, convicted, plea bargained, pardoned, whatever.
The issue is whether smoking a joint is a bad enough crime for a **legal** immigrant to deserve deportation. That's the only case in which plea bargains make any difference.
Anonymous is correct. Even if this proposal passed, "illegal presence" in the United States is a federal crime. It wouldn't have mattered if the DA, whether it was Ritter or Carol Chambers (who used the ag trespass plea bargain almost as much as Ritter did) pled a state charge down to jaywalking; if the perp was in the United States illegally in the first place, how would that plea have any effect on the still-outstanding federal charge of illegal presence? That doesn't mean there couldn't be a separate deal to address the federal charge, but a plea to a totally unrelated state charge wouldn't do it in and of itself.
This is a huge issue that Ritter has addressed directly but the media largely refuse to acknowledge in their ongoing coverage of this issue. Right-wing "hero" Cory Voorhis never addressed it during his trial (insofar as the media coverage has indicated) and neither have the backers of this proposed constitutional change.
Is there an immigration attorney out there who can weigh in on this?
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