Need for interpreters complicates court cases

But by the time the 21-year-old Somali national pleaded guilty to child molesting this month – seven months after the attack – the case had come to epitomize the degree to which cultural and language barriers increasingly are affecting the cost and quality of justice in Allen County.

“The problem is, we’re dealing with people of a lot of different nationalities who have no English skills and there are few people to interpret for us,” said Prosecutor Karen Richards, whose office handled about 3,600 cases involving translators for non-English-speaking participants last year.

To the list of 15 languages – everything from Spanish to Arabic to Burmese to Punjabi – Abshir added one more: Mai Mai. When Abshir told police he couldn’t understand his rights in English, translators had to be brought in from Kansas City and St. Louis to ensure a fair trial. A trial became unnecessary, however, when Abshir pleaded guilty March 6 after facing more serious charges, including rape.

Allen Superior Judge Fran Gull said Abshir’s translators will cost the county more than $5,000 – perhaps a lot more. If the county hadn’t found the Mai Mai translators online, a professional search firm would have cost another $7,000. And even that would have been less than the estimated $13,120 expense of providing translators for this year’s trial of accused killer Simon Rios.

“(Abshir) may know enough English to buy of loaf of bread, but not enough to understand the complicated legal stuff,” Richards said, explaining how he could qualify for a translator after allegedly telling his young victim at knifepoint, “If you don’t have sex with me, you’ll die!”

Even though Abshir ultimately never went to trial – hardly a rarity in criminal cases – providing the translators was still necessary, Richards and Gull agreed, because lack of a translator could provide grounds for an appeal.

So, whatever the courts’ Tower of Babel bill turns out to be, the public will pay it because the law assures defendants the right to assist in their own defense. Like Abshir, they’ll get justice in their own language. But who will assure justice for increasingly hard-hit taxpayers?

Although no public officials are yet willing to say so openly, some have begun quietly to criticize social-service agencies that bring immigrants and refugees to town but fail to provide the ongoing services needed to assure their transition into the cultural mainstream. And language is often just the tip of the cultural iceberg, Richards said.

“(Courts and police) shouldn’t use family members and friends as interpreters because you’re often talking about very private issues. The dynamics of some cultures make it inappropriate to talk about certain things. We’ve even had interpreters try to intimidate victims (into not talking),” she said.

America has rightly been called a “melting pot” – a nation in which people of countless cultures, religions and tongues blended into a stew with many spices, but one overriding flavor. Today, however, talk of assimilation is often criticized as culturally insensitive. Instead, we are urged to “celebrate diversity.”

And, in truth, there can be great strength in diversity. It says so right on our coins: “E pluribus unum” – out of many, one.

But consider what has happened at the airport in Minneapolis, Minn., where Muslim cab drivers have turned away as many as 5,400 people over the last five years for possessing alcohol or guide dogs. About 75 percent of the airport’s 900 cabbies are Muslim – most from Somalia – and they claim transporting liquor or dogs would violate Islamic law. So far, authorities have let the cabbies get away with it.

But America’s diversity is precisely the reason its laws must apply equally, to everyone. A common language, obviously, makes that job easier, fairer and much less expensive. Groups working to bring new immigrants to Fort Wayne should make that a priority, not a taxpayer-subsidized afterthought.

Source: News-Sentinel, Mar 15, 2007