Innocent and Deported

by Matt Kelley

categories: Immigration, innocence, wrongful convictions

Published November 05, 2009 @ 04:35PM PT

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I've got bad news to share. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the case of cousins Julio Maldonado and Denis Calderon. Unfortunately, I came to the story too late. The day after I wrote, Maldonado was deported to Peru -- a country he left when he was three. He doesn't speak Spanish and found housing with distant relatives. He's stuck in a foreign land because of an injustice that started when he was jumped 13 years ago.

The Philadelphia City Paper has the sad story of Maldonado and Calderon, who is still detained in the U.S. and scheduled to be deported next year. The injustices suffered by these men never seem to end.

The cousins say they were wrongfully convicted of murder aggravated assault for a 1996 fight. They say they were the victims of a hate crime. They were involved in a scuffle after a group of white men began yelling racial epithets on a Philadelphia street and attacked them. Even prosecutors agree that the white men started the scuffle. Maldonado and Calderon then grabbed a steering-wheel lock and a baseball bat -- they say to defend themselves -- and critically injured a man who prosecutors say was an innocent bystander a man who prosecutors say was an innocent bystander ended up in a coma (he may have gone into a coma because of a pre-existing blood clotting condition, more below). The man died two years later. The white men were never charged.

And now the prosecutor who convicted them -- Seth Williams -- has been elected as Philadelphia's next attorney general.

The judge at their bench trial said Calderon and Maldonado had been justified in using force, but convicted them because they had allegedly beaten a bystander. They won an appeal when the judge learned that there was no trauma to the man who had died -- he apparently wasn't beaten. The judge at one point chided a prosecutor, saying: "I also remember these two individuals who had no records, going around the corner to get a beer and being attacked by these racists, you understand me?"

They never got their new trial, however, because their convictions were reinstated when prosecutors appealed the case. They served their sentences and moved onto the deportation conveyor belt. Maldonado's date came due on October 23 and he was deposited in Lima.

He says he will continue to fight, and hopes to come back to his adopted homeland soon:

"I just can't see myself staying away from the United States for so long," he says. "I think I had to go through all this so someone would finally notice there was an error somewhere down the road. The experts are the ones who need to resolve this, because the 'experts' were the ones who just kept making the case worse."

And there's still time for Calderon. Visit the family's website and get involved here.

[11/5/09, 9 p.m. ET: I updated the facts above when Philadelphia-based blogger and attorney Dave Bennion set me straight. In addition to the graf with the strikethrus, I edited the second sentence of the fifth paragraph because it was inaccurate before] Read the full facts here, though, because it's a complicated case and I'm not doing it justice (no pun intended).