Justice happens!

[madamesilverspurs]

A few months back I posted a story about the DA in Weld County, Colorado, being sued by the ACLU for raiding tax records illegally. He has been raising money for his defense by selling T-shirts that cast himself (and the sheriff) as victims of the ACLU. The case was heard in neighboring Larimer County, as all the Weld judges recused themselves. I got an email from a friend who was in court when the judge gave his ruling; the following is from the newspaper's online edition www.greeleytribune.com :

Judge Halts Operation Number Games

by Sharon Dunn

The investigation targeting illegal immigrants through their tax records at a Greeley tax preparation service was illegal, according to a Larimer District judge.

Judge James Hiatt put a stop to the identity theft investigation called Operation Number Games, saying deputies wrongly seized federal income tax records to pursue suspected illegal immigrants.

The judge today ordered Weld District Attorney Ken Buck and the sheriff's department to return or destroy all evidence seized. Buck immediately left the courtroom and would not comment about the order. His attorneys said they would appeal the ruling.

"This is an important ruling for all America," Reid Neureiter, an attorney with Jacobs, Chase, Frick, Kleinkopf and Kelly of Denver, who is working on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed for the preliminary injunction against Buck and Weld Sheriff John Cooke's joint operation called Operation Number Games. "Tax records should be private and just because you have a suspicion that someone filing records with a Hispanic tax preparer might be doing something wrong doesn’t give you license to seize 5,000 tax records and look for the needle in a haystack."

Buck and sheriff's investigators based their search of Amalia's Tax and Translation Service last October on one defendant who had been investigated for identify theft, who said illegal immigrants throughout the community knew to file their taxes there. Deputies searched through roughly 5,000 records and found evidence of roughly 1,330 illegal immigrants filing returns with false or stolen Social Security numbers, which the Internal Revenue Service required, regardless of citizenship. For such cases, the IRS issues individual taxpayer identification numbers.

To date, more than 100 cases have gone through the court system, with charges of identity theft or criminal impersonation, and none of those cases are affected by today's ruling. All progress on any pending arrest warrants were halted in March, giving Larimer District Judge James Hiatt time to ponder his ruling today.

Attorneys say it's likely today's ruling will have some bearing on the cases already in the system, given Weld District Court Judge James Hartmann already has ruled in one of the cases that the records search in this case was illegal.

"Now there's a second judge saying the search was illegal," said Mark Silverstein, legal director for the ACLU. "The ruling is a tremendous victory for the right of privacy. I hope that this ruling, and I expect this rulling, would be sustained on appeal and this will send a message to other law enforcement officials, who Ken Buck has said are looking at what happened here as perhaps a model for enforcement in other jurisdictions."

For more on this story, see Tuesday's Tribune.