The federal court on Wednesday granted the U.S. government\u2019s motion to dismiss without prejudice an indictment charging a woman for aiding a mother who provided false statement in an application for a U.S. passport for her minor daughter.<\/p>\n
U.S. District Court for the NMI Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona dismissed without prejudice the indictment charging Yan Juan Hu Taitano with false statement in application for U.S. passport.<\/p>\n
Dismissal without prejudice means the U.S. government may re-file the case against Taitano in the future.<\/p>\n
The judge issued the order following assistant U.S. attorney Russell H. Lorfing\u2019s motion to dismiss the indictment.<\/p>\n
Lorfing said the U.S. government cannot assure the presence of an essential witness at trial.<\/p>\n
\u201cWithout the testimony of this essential witness, the government submits that it would not be able to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt,\u201d Lorfing said.<\/p>\n
Last June 27, Manglona slapped Taitano\u2019s co-defendant, Yu Zhou, with a one-year probation sentence for providing false statement in an application for a U.S. passport for her minor daughter.<\/p>\n
Manglona also ordered Yu Zou to pay a $5,000 fine and $100 in court assessment fee, among other conditions.<\/p>\n
At a change of plea hearing last June 17, Zou waived the required investigation by the U.S. Probation for a presentence investigation report due to her eagerness to return back to her very young children in China.<\/p>\n
At the sentencing hearing, Manglona ordered Zou\u2019s passport and her child\u2019s passport to be returned to her.<\/p>\n
Lorfing then disclosed that the U.S. government had just served subpoena on Zou in order to secure her testimony for the upcoming trial of her co-defendant, Taitano, in this case.<\/p>\n
According to the indictment, on Dec. 3, 2014 on Saipan, Zou and Taitano knowingly made a false statement in the application for a U.S. passport for the minor child.<\/p>\n
In the application, Zou, allegedly aided by Taitano, stated that she had never been married, \u201cwhich statements she then and there well knew to be false.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The federal court on Wednesday granted the U.S. government\u2019s motion to dismiss without prejudice an…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[93,5924,12416,12263],"class_list":["post-231761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-district-court","tag-last-june","tag-yu-zhou","tag-yu-zou"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231761\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}