Man in extortion
\nraps acquitted<\/p>\n
The grand jury’s failure to include two words in the indictment led to the acquittal of a man charged with extortion.<\/p>\n
The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed last week the District Court of Saipan’s conviction of Du Bo, saying his indictment “lacked a necessary allegation of criminal intent, as such did not properly allege an offense against the United States.”<\/p>\n
The appellate court said the jury failed to state that Du, a native of China, committed the crime of extortion “knowingly or willingly.”<\/p>\n
The court noted that the indictment charged Du only with “unlawfully affecting commerce by ‘wrongful’ use of force.”<\/p>\n
Failure to include the element of willingness renders an indictment “constitutionally defective,” the court said.<\/p>\n
“Such a failure generally constitutes a fatal defect that cannot be cured through a jury instructions because a completely missing element leaves nothing for a petty jury to ratify,” the appellate said, as it returned Du’s case to the Saipan district court for dismissal of indictment. (MCM)<\/p>\n
Crewmen plead guilty<\/p>\n
Two crewmen of a Chinese fishing vessel that ferried 51 undocumented aliens into Guam pled guilty on Friday to charges of alien smuggling.<\/p>\n
District Judge Alex Munson accepted the plea agreement between the US Attorney’s Office and the crewmen. Xiao Yi Chu and Weng Zu Hui.<\/p>\n
The sentencing was set for November.<\/p>\n
Xiao was the master, and Weng the assistant engineer of the fishing vessel that traveled to Guam last May.<\/p>\n
They were charged with a criminal offense punishable by 10 years’ imprisonment and a fine of $250,000.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Man in extortion
\nraps acquitted<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47879","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47879"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47879\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}