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The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the conviction of a man caught trying to enter the country illegally in a case that initially was seen as a test of whether a flawed indictment could violate a defendant’s rights.
But in an 8-1 opinion, the court said that the indictment of Juan Resendiz-Ponce itself was sound. The indictment “did not deprive him of any significant protection that the constitutional guarantee of a grand jury was intended to confer,” Justice John Paul Stevens said.
I clearly don’t know enough about grand jury indictment rules, as I don’t see why the high court’s understanding was previously uncertain or disputed.…the grand jury indictment that followed [his arrest] fail to set out any specific acts showing how he tried to enter the United States. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the omission was so serious that it violated Resendiz-Ponce’s constitutional rights and required automatic reversal of the conviction.
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