It has taken 100 years, but the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York finally has caught up with the legal philosophy of Texas’ Judge Roy Bean, “the law west of the Pecos.”
Bean, presiding over a kind of kangaroo court in his Jersey Lily saloon at Langtry, Texas, once acquitted the murderer of a Chinese laborer on the these grounds: “I have read the entire 1879 Revised Statutes of Texas, and there ain’t a damn line here nowheres that makes it illegal to kill a Chinaman.”
On Jan. 23 the federal appeals court in Manhattan threw out the convictions of two mob killers because their victims, who were shot and then cut into pieces, had not been proved to be American citizens.
The two victims — Ronald Falcaro and Khaled Daoud — were executed in a Brooklyn garage in March 1979 so they would not become informants for federal prosecutors investigating a car-theft ring. The accused killers, Ronald Ustica and triggerman Henry Borelli, were convicted in federal court of conspiring to deprive the victims of their civil rights. Ustica and Borelli were sentenced to life in prison.
But there is a loophole. The civil-rights law, passed in 1870, provides penalties “if two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten or intimidate any citizen in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or the laws of the U.S.” The law specifically says “citizen.” Daoud was a Jordanian. Falcaro, apparently, was born on Long Island, but during the trial of his killers, he was never proved to be a U.S. citizen.
If they were not proven citizens, said the appeals court, they are not protected from conspiracies to deprive them of their civil rights. Borelli still must serve 150 years in jail on other charges, but Ustica, who allegedly paid for the contract killing, now only faces 10 years on auto-theft charges. The irony of this decision is that there is no one to blame for it. When Congress wrote the law, two years after the 14th Amendment conferred citizenship on former slaves, it deliberately used the word “citizen” so that newly freed blacks would be protected from infringements of their rights. You can’t fault the appeals court. The law is clear. It says “citizen” — not “person.” But the decision creates an unsettling precedent: The court has ruled that there are large numbers of people here who are not entitled to the full protection of U.S. laws.
Judge Bean notwithstanding, it has been a tradition in this country that all persons — citizens or not — are entitled to the full protection of U.S. laws. Aliens can’t vote, but if they are arrested on criminal charges, for example, they still have the right to an attorney, the right to a fair trial, the right to remain silent. Even illegal aliens, subject to summary deportation, have rights under U.S. law.
There is some talk in New York about appealing the court’s decision. But the only solution appears to be to change federal law. As it now stands, the non-citizens among us — resident aliens and undocumented aliens — are fair game for anyone who would violate their civil rights.
