by Joe Buffaloe
Daily Lobo columnist
There's a saying that the U.S. legal system is the worst in the world, except for all the rest.
I can't say if I agree with this or not, because I haven't been arrested in every country in the world yet. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist - or even a UNM undergraduate - to see that our courts do stupid things from time to time.
Consider lecturer Chao Sio, who as of Tuesday was still detained in the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center awaiting deportation to Kenya. She has taught courses at UNM on Swahili, refugee health and development. She is also a co-founder of Women Can International, a nonprofit organization that, among other things, fights poverty and HIV/AIDS in Kenya and elsewhere.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
Sounds like a shady character to me.
What was her crime, then? Did police find her fingerprints on a knife next to a dead body? Is there video surveillance of her robbing a bank? Did she practice dentistry without a license? Insult Iron Maiden?
Actually, she did something far more morally repugnant than all these dastardly crimes - she hired a bad lawyer.
If that sounds ridiculous, that's because it is. Sio committed no wrong. She simply got handed a raw deal. A lawyer was supposed to have filed on her behalf another appeal for political asylum, but the lawyer quit the law firm and moved without telling her, according to a Daily Lobo report on Tuesday, leaving her appeal to collect dust.
According to some law, this means we can't walk the streets at night without fearing Sio, and we will never be safe until she's out of the country.
I wonder what reason the government had for denying her application for political asylum in the first place. We should feel honored to have someone as knowledgeable and dedicated to serving mankind as Sio in our country. If Gov. Richardson or anyone else can stop this deportation, or at least let Sio return to Kenya on her own without legal consequences, they have no excuse not to.
This whole thing is depressing enough, but just for fun, let's consider UNM government relations director Marc Saavedra, who recently pleaded guilty to DWI. Even though, according to a Daily Lobo report, he had already pleaded guilty to aggravated DWI in 1997 - making this his second DWI offense - I would describe his sentence as meek at best. It includes 48 hours of community service, an ignition interlock, one year of unsupervised probation and $84 in court fees.
What happened to cracking down on drunk drivers? Where are the stiff new penalties? Sio is sitting in jail, about to be kicked out of the country, and all she did was spread awareness of Africa and help run an international humanitarian organization.
The punishment may not suggest it, but drunk driving sounds a little worse to me. Innocent people die because of it every day. The next time you step behind the wheel after tossing back a few, imagine a head-on collision with your grandparents or your best friends, then watching them slowly die in a hospital. That's what happens when people drive drunk - some lose their lives, and others lose the people they care about the most.
Unfortunately, people don't usually think about this. Maybe it just takes an unusually strong person to bite the bullet and pass out on a friend's couch instead of swerving back home at 3 a.m. Tough penalties that reflect society's disgust for drunk driving are part of the solution, though.
I don't know if Saavedra's sentence has anything to do with the fact that he's the son of Democratic state Rep. Henry "Kiki" Saavedra, or if it was due to his attendance of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and his admission that he has an alcohol problem, but the court has missed this opportunity to send a message. If drunk driving is such a bad thing, why won't Saavedra serve jail time?
I commend Saavedra for seeking help, and I truly hope he will recover from his alcoholism and be a good example to UNM students, as he has said he wants to be. Treating alcoholism is a better solution than punishing it, anyway. But Saavedra could have killed someone, and he didn't learn his lesson the first time, either. Had he not begun treatment on his own, his arrest would have led to virtually no change whatsoever.
So a drunk driver gets a slap on the hand, and a woman dedicated to serving humanity gets the boot. God bless America.
I say if someone has to be punished so harshly, maybe Saavedra and Sio could trade sentences. Sio can do some community service - she does that on her own free will anyway - and we can ship Saavedra to Kenya, far from our roads.
