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Cultural Background Gains Traction as a Legal Defense

By standdown

That's the title of an article in today's Wall Street Journal written by Amir Efrati.  LINK The old saw among law enforcement is that ignorance of the law is no defense. But some think it should be, at least in some circumstances, particularly when immigrants act in ways that seem ordinary in their homeland but are illegal in the U.S. Defense attorneys and even some judges are increasingly pushing the idea that immigrants at times should be able to defend themselves by arguing that their cultural background influenced them. "Taking a person's cultural background into consideration is no different from judges taking into consideration a defendant's gender, age and mental state," says Alison Dundes Renteln, a political science professor at the University of Southern California...continue to full post

Full post as published by StandDown Texas Project on July 02, 2009 (boomark / email).