WATERLOO - Attorneys for the former Agriprocessors executive who was convicted of federal fraud charges in November will ask a state court judge to throw out child labor violations Wednesday.
Lawyers for ex-CEO Sholom Rubashkin allege the Iowa Division of Labor Services, which investigated the case, didn't share with the company information about minors holding jobs the Postville meatpacking plant.
Agriprocessors, owner Abraham Aaron Rubashkin, Sholom Rubashkin, and human resources workers Elizabeth Billmeyer, Laura Althouse and Karina Freund were arrested on misdemeanor charges alleging some 9,311 counts of child labor law violations.
The state claims minors were allowed to work in a slaughtering operation, exposed to dangerous chemicals, operated power-driven machinery and worked a prohibited number of hours in a day.
Prosecutors and the defense will meet Wednesday at the Black Hawk County Courthouse for a hearing on Sholom Rubashkin's request that the charges be dropped.
Lawyers for the defense said all of the minors involved had submitted false dates of birth to the company to get hired. Many of them also had false birth certificates and had family or other relatives at the plant.
According to Sholom Rubashkin's attorney, the Division of Labor began its probe in early 2008 and in April 2008 brought a facial recognition expert to look for minors at Agriprocessors.
Sholom Rubashkin allowed the expert, whose specialty was judging the age of people from Latin American countries, inside to interview employees.
Labor officials also interviewed employees outside the plant and reviewed student records at Postville High School as part of their probe, defense attorneys said.
Defense attorneys claim Division of Labor officials ignored Agriprocessors' requests to identify the workers suspected of being minors.
"Had Agriprocessors and Defendant Sholom Rubashkin knew who the minors were they would have terminated these employees," defense attorney F. Montgomery Brown of West Des Moines wrote in his request to dismiss the charges.
Instead, labor division officials allowed the minors to continue working at the plant and had planned to raid the facility, defense attorneys said in court records.
But a raid by immigration agents in May 2008 derailed the planned raid by the Department of Labor.
Records submitted by the defense show Agriprocessors once fired a worker suspected of being underage in June 2007. Billmeyer noticed a picture of the female employee in connection with a newspaper article about Postville High School and eighth-grade students placing in a carbon dioxide-powered car contest. The name of the person in the paper was different than the name used on her employment application.
When the employee was later asked to produce an original birth certificate, she became belligerent and was fired, records show.
Billmeyer also terminated three other female employees who were found to be under age 18. Two were 15, and one had recently finished the eighth grade, according to termination forms.
A federal jury found Sholom Rubashkin, 50, guilty of 86 counts of bank, mail and wire fraud, money laundering and failure to pay livestock providers in a timely manner in November. Sentencing in that case is still pending.
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www.crownheights.info/index.php?itemid=23255
the charges were overblown and the defense were not permitted to bring their most important witnesses. if this is true, its truly outrageous!