FILE – The U.S. District Courthouse in downtown Minneapolis. (KSTP/file)
A judge on Tuesday said he’s giving the U.S. government one last chance to prove it has a real case against a Minnesota woman accused of assaulting federal law enforcement in Minneapolis.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Gillian Suzanne Etherington on assault with a deadly weapon and other charges on Jan. 7.
U.S. District Judge David T. Schultz said he didn’t trust the testimony of the agent who wrote up the complaint affidavit against Etherington and he said the video the government later provided didn’t support the complaint.
ICE agents said they encountered Etherington near the chaos at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis on Jan. 7. They said they first saw her driving erratically, swerving in and out of traffic, around 3 p.m. that day.
ICE agents reported that she bumped into one of their vehicles which was participating in a roving patrol, forcing the Border Patrol convoy to split up.
Then, the agents said, near the high school, Etherington tried to drive away from agents but rammed into the rear of another Border Patrol vehicle, damaging it.
Special Agent Richard Berger wrote up the complaint, laying out the request for a warrant for Etherington’s arrest.
But when Etherington appeared in federal court Tuesday morning, Judge Schultz said he ran into a lot of Agent Berger’s affidavits during Operation Metro Surge, and he doesn’t trust them.
“In all of them I became concerned with the veracity of his affidavits,” Schultz told the special assistant U.S. attorney prosecuting the case. “… [It] became quite clear … Mr. Berger does not, did not have personal knowledge [of the events]. … That’s a fake affidavit.”
Schultz added that the video the prosecution had turned in to support the charges didn’t support the language used in either the affidavit or later filings.
Of her attempt to drive away, the prosecution said she “reversed and aggressively drove away, ramming the vehicle,” Schultz said. But, after reviewing the video, he said, “I would not fairly describe the impact … as involving any ramming.”
So, he said, he’d give the government one more chance. Schultz ordered an unusual evidentiary hearing in what he called an already “atypical” case.
Schultz ended by saying, “I highly doubt anything I say today comes as a surprise to the government.”
The judge gave the prosecution four weeks to prepare for that evidentiary hearing. He warned he wants to hear directly from border patrol agents involved in that incident. He said he won’t accept any form of second-hand testimony.
Also of note: The prosecution attorney in this case is now at least the third on this case since January. She just got to Minnesota from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in North Carolina.
Courtesy of KTSP
