Errors Keep Dozens Too Long in San Diego’s Federal Jail, Records Show

SAN DIEGO —  It took only a few minutes one Monday in July for Idalia Aguillon, a Beverly Hills investment counselor, and her 62-year-old mother, Sofia, to plead guilty and be placed on probation for smuggling an illegal alien through the San Ysidro border crossing the day before.

The women--who claimed that they were doing a favor for a Tijuana hitchhiker--should have been back in their Los Angeles home a few hours later. Instead, two days and two nights passed before a release order arrived at San Diego’s Metropolitan Correctional Center from the U.S. District Court in San Diego, one block away. Only then did jailers set the women free.

It was a nightmarish wait, according to Aguillon, 29. Hour after hour, the women--neither of whom had a prior criminal record--tried to convince jail guards that a magistrate had ordered them released, she said. But jail officials showed little interest in their tearful complaints.

“It was: ‘You’re here and that’s tough. Your release papers never got up here, so it’s your tough luck,’ ” Aguillon recalled last week. “We were just incredulous. It was incredibly emotionally difficult.”

The women’s experience was hardly unique. According to court records, bureaucratic snafus have left dozens of defendants and material witnesses locked up as long as seven weeks after they were due to be freed from San Diego’s federal jail, one of the nation’s busiest.

Defense lawyers and the American Civil Liberties Union blame institutional callousness and racism for the delays. Most delays involve illegal aliens from Mexico and Central America or, occasionally, U.S. citizens of Latino heritage like the Aguillons.

“They’re not treated as regular human beings,” said Gregory Marshall, legal director of the ACLU’s San Diego Chapter, which is considering a class-action lawsuit seeking cash damages for inmates held beyond their release dates. “They’re being treated as a subspecies. It’s: ‘They all look alike. Their names all sound alike. Who cares if they get released tomorrow or next week?’ ”

Federal officials acknowledge some delays. But they say the numbers are minuscule in relation to the 7,500 defendants and 2,000 or more material witnesses processed through the San Diego district court each year. And they say paper-work foul-ups--not racism or any other kind of malevolence--are to blame for the occasional problems.

“I don’t care who it is. We do care,” said Al Kanahele, warden of the 540-bed federal jail.

“Although these guys are convicts and criminals, we try to use a humane approach to treating them,” he said. “Once in a while, one will fall through the cracks. But as a whole, I think we’re doing a pretty good job of releasing these guys.”

Federal Defenders, the public defender agency for San Diego’s federal district court, has been complaining about the release delays for four years.

Late in 1985, a spot check by the agency of court records identified 27 instances in a 20-month period of delays stretching from three days to nearly seven weeks.

Several weeks ago, Federal Defenders sent Chief U.S. District Judge Gordon Thompson Jr. a new list of 20 cases from the previous five months, including release delays of two to 20 days.

Most of the delays uncovered by Federal Defenders have involved people not charged with any crime. Rather, they slow the release of material witnesses--typically, illegal aliens held to testify against the smugglers who carried them across the border.

Though federal law allows them to post bail and go free pending the smugglers’ trials, officials say, most of the witnesses remain in jail or in contract detention centers until the cases in which they may testify are resolved.

But sometimes the witnesses--whose jailing, like other inmates’, costs the federal government about $30 per day--are seemingly forgotten.

Nabor Valdez-Duran was in the trunk of a car stopped July 3 at the U.S. Border Patrol’s checkpoint on Interstate 5 at San Clemente. Court records say the illegal alien was held to testify against Mateo Hernandez-Maldonado, a Mexican national who was driving the car, and his companion, Cheryl Brown, both of whom were charged with alien smuggling.

On July 6, Brown was released on probation, and Hernandez-Maldonado was sentenced to 40 days in jail after each pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor aiding and abetting charge. Because of the guilty pleas, Valdez-Duran never had to appear in court to testify against them.

Nonetheless, it was not until Aug. 26--about 50 days after the case was resolved and more than a week after the defendant, Hernandez-Maldonado, had finished serving his time--that the U.S. attorney’s office forwarded the paper work to U.S. Magistrate Roger C. McKee permitting Valdez-Duran’s release, court records say.

Federal officials acknowledged that there was no justification for the delay.

“Obviously there was a breakdown in communication somewhere along the line,” said James W. Brannigan Jr., chief of the criminal division of the U.S. attorney’s office. “It’s regrettable. We’re sorry it happened. We try not to have those things happen.”

But Brannigan--like officials of other criminal justice agencies that play a role in the release process--said the high volume of alien-related cases swamping San Diego’s federal courts make occasional oversights inevitable.

“With the number of people involved in it and the number of cases we handle of this type--which is roughly in the 4,000 to 5,000 range in a year--we’re going to have some of these things happen,” according to Brannigan, who said he drills his deputies on the importance of filing release forms. “There are going to be human mistakes made.”

Lawyers and federal officials say mistakes can be made at numerous junctures in the processing of an inmate’s court paper work.

Errors in Documents

In the case of criminal defendants, errors can be made on the court documents that detail a defendant’s sentence. Or the delivery of the papers to the jail by the U.S. Marshals Service may be delayed.

The same problems may befall documents ordering material witnesses’ release. And sometimes--as in Valdez-Duran’s case--neither the prosecutor nor the witnesses’ court-appointed attorney will remember to ask a judge to issue release papers after the case in which the aliens were to testify is resolved. Without a court order, the jail holds the witnesses indefinitely.

“Talk about a subclass of ignored people,” said Judy C. Clarke, executive director of Federal Defenders, “the criminal defendants are bad enough. The material witnesses--they’re cared about less.”

At Clarke’s behest, Thompson convened a meeting late last month of officials representing the jail, the U.S. attorney’s office, the court clerk, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the U.S. Marshals Service in hopes of ironing out whatever procedural problems appeared to be causing the release delays.

Thompson said he is convinced that the delays are rare exceptions rather than evidence of inherent flaws in the court’s systems. But he agreed that one overdue release is too many--even if many of the aliens are freed only to be returned to Mexico by the immigration service.

“I know our government is big and I know we’ve got a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of paper work,” the judge said. “But they’re still human beings, and they shouldn’t be held one day longer than they’re sentenced.”

Changes Directed

As a result of the meeting, Thompson directed that several changes be made in court practices.

Thompson said he also plans to meet with the panel of court-appointed attorneys who represent material witnesses to remind them of their duty to see to their clients’ speedy release. That meeting--along with the earlier session with federal officials--should resolve the delay problems, Thompson predicted in an interview last week.

“By the very fact they’re all alerted to my feelings on it--and my feelings were of concern--I’m sure there will be some action taken,” Thompson said.

Clarke, though, said she was less optimistic after Thompson’s meeting with the federal agencies, because no entity had been willing to accept responsibility for eliminating the delays.

“My sense of the meeting was that everybody pointed the finger at everybody else,” she said. “It was also that we ought to be happy that as many people get released timely as do.”

Clarke and Marshall of the ACLU say they suspect that only a lawsuit will motivate federal officials to take the steps necessary--perhaps the designation of an office or individual to track cases through the length of the court process--to eliminate the release delays.

“With the exception of taking somebody’s life, this is the worst civil liberties violation there is,” said Marshall. “They are totally depriving people of their liberty without any kind of legal process.”