No interpreter was needed during grand jury proceedings in 2005, a Tulsa federal judge rules.
Tulsa World
By DAVID HARPER World Staff Writer
Published: 4/23/2011 2:28 AM
Last Modified: 4/23/2011 2:28 AM
Hasan Ali Hasan: He was found guilty of perjury in 2006 for statements he made about why he was fleeing Somalia. |
A Somali man who was convicted of perjury in Tulsa was "clearly capable" of communicating in English during the 2005 grand jury proceedings at the heart of the case against him, a federal judge has ruled.
Hasan Ali Hasan, 31, was found guilty of perjury in May 2006 for statements he made about why he was fleeing Somalia.
He had an interpreter during his trial. In May 2008, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sent the matter back to U.S. District Judge James Payne with instructions to review whether Hasan also should have had an interpreter during the grand jury process.
Payne wrote in a July 3, 2008, order that during both the trial and the grand jury proceedings, Hasan spoke primarily English and that there was no deprivation of "fundamental fairness."
In August 2008, Payne reimposed a one-year, three-month prison sentence he originally gave Hasan in November 2006.
However, the appellate court ruled last June that while Payne did consider information in 2008 that showed that Hasan regularly spoke English, the judge did not compare those abilities to Hasan's Somali-language skills.
In an order late Thursday, Payne wrote that there is no way to be sure whether Hasan's ability to speak Somali was or was not better than his ability to speak English in 2005.
However, Payne found that "the lack of an interpreter during the grand jury did not inhibit Mr. Hasan's comprehension of the grand jury proceedings and communications therein or his comprehension of the questions and presentation of the testimony to such an extent as to have made the grand jury proceedings fundamentally unfair."
Hasan fled Somalia during its civil war, which began in the early 1990s, and was granted asylum in the United States in 1997, according to court documents.
He was interviewed by a federal immigration agent in 2004 about his reasons for seeking asylum. In 2005, two grand juries investigated whether he was truthful in that interview.
The December 2005 indictment in which Hasan was charged claimed that he gave inconsistent statements about the year his brother was killed and whether anyone had tried to harm his sister in Somalia.
Hasan has already served his prison sentence.