The US Appeals Court for the Fifth Circuit ruled  Thursday that anti-Castro militant Luis Posada Carriles will stand trial in the US for alleged immigration violations, effectively blocking extradition efforts by Cuba and Venezuela. Both countries say that the US is bound by international treaties, including the International Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Bombings and the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Civil Aviation, to hand over Carriles, but the US has so far refused to do so. Carriles, a Venezuelan-born Cuban citizen, is wanted in both Cuba and Venezuela on terrorism charges relating to the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airplane.

Carriles was arrested in 2005 for illegally entering the US and had been under the custody of immigration officials until his release on bail in April 2007. Cuba criticized Carriles' release, and accused the US of violating international anti-terrorism treaties by freeing him and dismissing charges against him. Also in April 2007, Venezuela announced plans to challenge the US before the Organization of American States and other international bodies for refusing to prosecute or extradite Carriles for the terrorist bombing. The US government has cited the UN Convention Against Torture as justification for denying Cuban and Venezuelan requests to extradite Carriles, asserting that Carriles could face torture in those countries.

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Wednesday ordered a district court to accept guilty pleas entered by three illegal aliens facing immigration charges. The defendants had entered unconditional guilty pleas to charges that they re-entered the country after having been removed previously, a violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The lower court had refused to accept the guilty pleas because it found they were not entered in accordance with  procedural rules governing pleas, and a US Attorney charged the men with more serious violations of the INA punishable by longer prison terms. Holding that the pleas were not in violation of the rule and ordering their acceptance, the Ninth Circuit stated:

  The government lost its power to file additional charges the moment defendants pled guilty knowingly, voluntarily, and unconditionally before the magistrate judges. Defendants' pleas may not have taken final legal effect at that moment, as defendants remained free to withdraw their pleas...But whatever legal significance may attach to a guilty plea taken by a magistrate judge, the plea also carries significant real-world consequences. A defendant's guilty plea is a confession, freely and publicly made, that he is a criminal. This has immediate and enduring effects on the defendant's standing in the community, and for that reason and many others is often an excruciating experience. If the confession meets the requirements of Rule 11(b) - requirements that exist for the defendant's own protection - then the government has no power to force the defendant to go through the ordeal again to serve its own purposes.

Last week, The American Civil Liberties Union obtained a government handbook issued to the lawyers defending illegal immigrants arrested in May raids on a meat-processing plant in Iowa. The ACLU then accused federal prosecutors of pushing guilty pleas on the immigrants. The handbook included pre-printed forms to be used for filing guilty pleas, but had no information on contesting the charges. Representatives from both the Department of Justice and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement have defended the government's arrest and conviction processes in those cases, saying that the immigrants' constitutional rights were strictly applied.