Judge wants proof Somali suspects were adults

A judge vowed to dismiss child-abuse charges against two Somali refugees from Cleveland unless prosecutors can prove the two were not children when their alleged crimes occurred.

Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge John Sutula told a county prosecutor this week that she would have to prove the two females were not juveniles when they supposedly burned children whom they baby-sat last year.

If the state can't prove within the next few days that the females were 18 or older, Sutula said, he will throw out the case. For the same reason, prosecutors can't refile the charges in Juvenile Court without proof the defendants were juveniles.

Prosecutors and police say Bindi Issa and Habibo Mohammed heated dinner forks over a gas flame and branded their baby-sitting charges - two 10-year-old girls and a 7-year-old boy - in January 2006 as punishment for misbehavior.

Their trial on charges of felonious assault, kidnapping and child endangering was to begin this week, but now is on hold indefinitely. If convicted, they could face decades in prison and deportation.

The two are refugees from the genocidal civil war that has raged in Somalia since 1991. The two fled as children with their families and other members of their Bantu ethnic group to neighboring Kenya, where the United Nations oversaw sprawling refugee camps.

From those camps springs the legal quagmire.

According to their U.N.-issued identification documents, Issa was born on Jan. 1, 1987, and Mohammed exactly a year later. But two witnesses, including an established expert on Somali culture and refugee resettlement, testified that refugee-camp clerks made up birthdays out of thin air and assigned them to the Bantu refugees.

Omar A. Eno, who directs Portland State University's resettlement-oriented National Somali Bantu Project, estimated 90 percent of the roughly 12,500 Bantu refugees in the United States have legal birthdays he called questionable.

Resettlement "screening officers" in the camps, he said, would guess at a refugee's age, and the compliant, scared and illiterate refugees would agree to whatever they were told.

"So you're saying [refugees'] ages could be off by two or three years?" Sutula asked.

"In some cases it could be more than that," Eno replied.

The judge predicted that if he tried the case without proof the two women were 18 or older at the time their crimes allegedly occurred, an appeals court would probably toss out his verdict.

Assistant County Prosecutor Anna Faraglia countered that the women rely on the assigned birth dates for every other legal and practical purpose, so they also should apply in court.

"So if they say they're 65 years old, I'd have to believe that, too?" Sutula snapped.

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Source: Plain Dealer, May 24, 2007