Magistrate judge denies Sun request to ‘convert’ cash bond to unsecured bond

U.S. District Court for the NMI Magistrate Judge Heather L. Kennedy denied Thursday Sen Sun’s request to require him to post an unsecured bond instead of $8,500 cash as a condition of his temporary release.

Despite Sun’s story that the $8,500 that was seized from him at the time of his arrest has been converted by the U.S. government into a cashier’s check and mailed off-island for safekeeping, Kennedy said that this does not alter her decision to impose the secured bond.

Sun, allegedly an overstaying Chinese tourist, was indicted in federal court for allegedly operating an unlicensed business that offered trip packages to pregnant Chinese women seeking to give birth here. The indictment charged him with harboring illegal aliens, unlawfully employing aliens, and money laundering.

Sun, through counsel Benjamin K. Petersburg, had asked the court to amend his conditions of release.

Assistant U.S. attorney Eric O’Malley, counsel for the U.S. government, opposed.

O’Malley said that an unsecured bond will have little to no effect on Sun’s decision to abide by the court’s directives.

In her order Friday, Kennedy noted that during Sun’s detention hearing, she found that release or personal recognizance or on an unsecured bond would not reasonably assure Sun’s appearance and imposed the least restrictive combination of conditions to assure his appearance in court.

Those conditions included an $8,500 secured bond, Sun’s release to a third-party custodian, and location monitoring.

Kennedy said while the amount that she set equaled the amount seized from Sun upon his arrest, his other, unexplained financial resources, his delay in submitting his passport and his ties to a foreign nation warrant the conditions, including the secured bond, irrespective of the availability of the $8,500 seized from him.

Without new information, Kennedy said, Sun will be released when the court’s imposed conditions are met, as ordered during the Nov. 15 detention hearing.

O’Malley has concerns about the proposed third party custodian for Sun—his former landlord—and is likely a witness to Sun’s illegal operation.

At this point, the U.S. government has no reason to believe the proposed custodian was involved in the illegal operation, but he was at least passively involved, O’Malley said.

Assigning a prospective witness as third-party custodian would obviously make it impossible for Sun to abide by the court’s “no contact” order, he added.