Former Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan was back in federal court Wednesday doing what she does best: shamelessly twisting the law to avoid accountability for her willful criminality.
Fresh off a jury conviction for obstructing federal immigration agents, Dugan and her legal team are now clutching at the straw of a single appeals court ruling from Virginia that is neither relevant for her case nor sets precedent to govern it. Still Dugan’s attorneys are begging U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman to vacate her felony conviction for obstructing a pending federal proceeding.
On May 8, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in United States v. Hernandez overturned the conviction of an illegal immigrant who had been convicted under the same statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1505, that Dugan was. In that case, a Salvadoran national named Dennis Zeledon Hernandez was taken into ICE custody pursuant to a final removal order. He then escaped and was charged with obstructing a “pending proceeding.”
The Fourth Circuit held that once the immigration court had issued its final order of removal against Hernandez, ICE’s efforts to recapture him were not pursuant to a pending proceeding under 18 U.S.C. § 1505. The proceeding had concluded and thus a charge was logically impossible.
Dugan’s case could not possibly be more different than Hernandez’s. He was a detainee breaking out of custody. She was a sitting Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge who actively interfered with federal agents trying to arrest Eduardo Flores-Ruiz (a violent criminal illegal with a removal order and valid warrant) in the courthouse.
She confronted the agents outside her courtroom, questioned their authority, sent them away to the chief judge’s office to bide time, and then snuck Flores-Ruiz through a jury room door and out a back exit. This wasn’t a post-detention escape; it was pre-arrest sabotage in a public courtroom by someone sworn to uphold the law.
The factual distinctions are glaring, and the legal ones even more so. The Fourth Circuit’s ruling isn’t binding precedent in the Seventh Circuit, which covers Wisconsin. It’s an outlier decision from another part of the country that prosecutors correctly called exactly that during oral arguments before Adelman on Wednesday.
He now has no choice but to side with prosecutors and dismiss what is ultimately a last-second Hail Mary from a legal team that has made increasingly desperate and ridiculous arguments with each post-conviction brief it writes.
Hannah Dugan violated the law. Period. Full stop. The evidence against her was overwhelming. A jury of her peers convicted her. Should Adelman suddenly dismiss all of this to accept a non-binding court decision in a case that is wholly unlike Dugan’s in every material respect, he would be slapping the Rule of Law itself in the face.
Dugan abused the awesome power the State of Wisconsin bestowed upon her to try and help a violent criminal escape justice—not because she believed he was innocent, but because of her political opposition to the law enforcement agency seeking to arrest him.
That is unconscionable, inexcusable, and incompatible with American jurisprudence. Her actions constituted nothing short of a threat to this country’s system of justice and now she must face justice for them.
