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Interpreter for some of the 400 immigrants arrested and sentenced in meat packing raid speaks up in their defense

By Real Cost of Prisons Project (The Sentencing Project)

July 11, 2008, NY Times An Interpreter Speaking Up for Migrants By JULIA PRESTON WATERLOO, Iowa ? In 23 years as a certified Spanish interpreter for federal courts, Erik Camayd-Freixas has spoken up in criminal trials many times, but the words he uttered were rarely his own. Then he was summoned here by court officials to translate in the hearings for nearly 400 illegal immigrant workers arrested in a raid on May 12 at a meatpacking plant. Since then, Mr. Camayd-Freixas, a professor of Spanish at Florida International University, has taken the unusual step of breaking the code of confidentiality among legal interpreters about their work. In a 14-page essay he circulated among two dozen other interpreters who worked here, Professor Camayd-Freixas wrote that the immigrant defendants whose words he translated, most of them villagers from Guatemala, did not fully understand the criminal charges they were facing or the rights most of them had waived...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog on July 11, 2008 (boomark / email).