At 1:30 p.m. this Wednesday, June 15th, in the Thomas Eagleton Federal Courthouse in St. Louis, Missouri, an appeal will be argued before three judges on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in one of the most bitterly contested and controversial criminal trials in many years. The appeal -- United States v. Sholom Rubashkin -- involves Rubashkin's conviction of multiple counts of bank fraud, for which he was sentenced to 27 years imprisonment. His trial followed the 2008 raid -- the biggest in U.S. history -- by more than 600 federal Immigration and Customs agents (ICE) on Rubashkin's kosher meat-packing plant in Postville, Iowa and the arrest of 389 undocumented workers, mostly Mexican. Rubashkin was arrested for immigration-related crimes, but re-arrested and tried on the financial crimes. Whether Rubashkin is guilty and deserves the astonishingly harsh sentence are pertinent issues that will be argued on his appeal. But just as pertinent -- maybe more so -- is the conduct of the judges, trial and appellate, called upon to administer justice in his case. (Full disclosure: Co-author Gershman has signed amicus briefs on behalf of Rubashkin).
The central claim on Rubashkin's appeal is that the federal judge who presided at Rubashkin's trial and sentence, and who imposed a prison sentence greater than even the prosecutors asked for, and that six former United States Attorneys General -- Nicholas Katzenbach, Ramsey Clark, Edwin Meese, Richard Thornburgh, William Barr, and Janet Reno -- and seventeen former federal prosecutors and high-ranking Justice Department officials have decried as an unbelievably harsh punishment for a first-time, non-violent offender, "appeared" to be heavily involved with the government prosecutors and federal agents in planning and carrying out the unprecedented raid. Internal government documents, discovered by Rubashkin's lawyers for the first time after his trial, showed that the trial judge -- who is, indeed, the Chief Judge of the Federal Court in Cedar Rapids, Iowa -- met frequently, sometimes weekly, with the prosecutors and law enforcement agents in planning and executing the raid for six months before the raid and Rubashkin's arrest, in which the following was discussed:
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