US v. De Leon-Ramirez:
De Leon-Ramirez, a native of Guatemala, was returned there in 2006 after
serving a sentence for counterfeiting. In 2007 he was arrested in Virginia following
an argument in a store. Upon arrest De Leon-Ramirez gave police a different name.
Police ran his fingerprints and found connections to two other different names.
De Leon-Ramirez was released on bond, but failed to appear for subsequent
proceedings and a state arrest warrant was issued (and a bounty hunter took the
case). Nine years later, in 2016, De Leon-Ramirez was arrested on unrelated
charges, which attracted the attention of immigration officials. De
Leon-Ramirez was charged with illegal reentry. He moved to dismiss the charges
because the five-year statute of limitations had lapsed. Concluding that officials
knew De Leon-Ramirez had returned to the US in 2007, the court nonetheless
concluded that he fled from justice, tolling the running of the statute of
limitations. De Leon-Ramirez entered a conditional guilty plea and was
sentenced to 21 months in prison.
The Fourth Circuit affirmed the
conviction. After concluding that the unorthodox way in which the district
court reviewed the recommendations of the magistrate judge who heard the motion
to dismiss was acceptable, but not recommended, the court assumed without
deciding that the statute of limitations began to run in this case in 2007. Fugitive
tolling requires proof that the defendant “concealed himself with the intent to
avoid prosecution.” The court found that standard met (or at least not found to
be clearly erroneous) because De Leon-Ramirez used an alias to “withhold his
true identity from law enforcement” when arrested in 2007 and that he failed to
appear for subsequent state court hearings.
No comments:
Post a Comment