Judge throws out female genital mutilation case years after declaring law unconstitutional - MLive.com
More than four years after the federal government brought criminal charges against two Michigan doctors and four mothers accused of subjecting children to religious-based female genital mutilation, the case was thrown out of federal court Tuesday.
While the federal law outlawing female genital mutilation was passed by Congress in 1996, this was the first indictment under the statute in the federal courts.
The case focused on Dr. Jumana Nagarwala, a former Henry Ford physician from Northville, who was accused of conducting female circumcisions on children, and Dr. Fakhruddin Attar, accused of providing his Livonia clinic as a venue to complete the secretive, after-hours operations.
The legal death blow was really delivered by U.S. District Judge Bernard A. Friedman Nov. 20, 2018, when he ruled that the federal statute on which the U.S. Attorney’s Office was relying is unconstitutional, dismissing some of the most serious charges. That ruling was upheld by the appellate court.
“As despicable as this practice may be, it is essentially a criminal assault” that should be regulated by the states, Friedman’s November 2018 opinion said.
That ruling and dismissal of charges ultimately led the U.S. Attorney’s Office to pivot and amend charges and defendants for the fourth time since the first indictment was secured in 2017. Prosecutors in March 2021 added charges of making false statements to federal officers and tampering with witnesses.
Friedman called the latest alterations to the lingering case “clearly unreasonable and indicative of vindictiveness,” and ordered a dismissal in a ruling issued Tuesday, Sept. 28.
“It is unreasonable for the prosecutor to bring any of these charges in light of the Court’s ruling that the FGM (female genital mutilation) statute is unconstitutional,” Friedman ruled.
“All of the charges presented in the fourth superseding indictment require a showing that defendants committed, or conspired to commit, a federal offense. The purported federal offense in this case is FGM. It is alleged that defendants falsely told law enforcement that FGM was not being performed in their community and that they conspired to, and did, tell community members to give law enforcement the same misinformation. But telling such lies, conspiring to do so, and coercing others to do so was not a crime during the time frame at issue (May 2016 - April 2017) because the statute making FGM a federal offense was unconstitutional.”
The government argued that female genital mutilation was a federal offense until the court declared the law unconstitutional in November 2018.
“The Court rejects this argument,” Friedman wrote in his ruling. “The Court’s ruling that Congress lacked the authority to pass (the ban) means that the statute was void ab initio (from the beginning.”
It’s not clear if the U.S. Attorney’s Office intends to appeal the ruling. The office has not yet responded to a request for comment.
The procedure in question is a centuries-old religious rite sometimes conducted by the India-based Dawooni Bohra Muslim sect. There are approximately 500,000 members of the Dawoodi Bohra sect worldwide
The practice involves removal of portions of or the entirety of a woman’s labia or clitoris, usually between ages 6 and 9, according to prosecutors. The reasons for the operation vary, but include religious tradition, hygiene and intent to reduce sexual urges in women to decrease infidelity and promote virginity, according to the World Health Organization, an aggressive opponent of the practice.
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source: https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2021/09/judge-throws-out-female-genital-mutilation-case-years-after-declaring-law-unconstitutional.html
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