In the eyes of journalists, authors, and academics plagiarism is a sin. It’s no big deal in a courtroom, where judges swipe language all the time. On December 29, when immigration judge Elizabeth Hacker of Detroit ordered Ibrahim Parlak deported, originality wasn’t her concern. Huge unattributed chunks of her 59-page opinion–one of them 15 pages long–were lifted almost verbatim from the Department of Homeland Security’s pretrial brief. The DHS lawyers had no reason to complain. Hacker had not only bought their argument but appropriated it. Parlak’s lawyers, however, felt a little ganged up on.
The Parlak case has been on the periphery of the news ever since July 29, when he was locked in a cell in Calhoun County, Michigan. Parlak is a Kurd, and the goal of the PKK, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party, is an independent Kurdish state. In 1988 he was arrested and imprisoned in Turkey. In 1991 he was granted asylum in the United States. In 1997 the State Department designated the PKK a terrorist organization.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Parlak claims that as a 16-year-old he was tortured by the Turkish government for pamphleteering. When he was 18 he traveled to Germany and promoted the Kurdish cause there. At 25 he received military training at a PKK camp in Lebanon. When the camp ended in May 1988, Parlak joined a small group of Kurds who tried to slip back into Turkey by way of Syria. There was a gunfight at the border, and two Turkish soldiers were killed.
Last July DHS got word that the Turkish prosecutor’s appeal has finally been resolved: Turkey has resentenced Parlak to six years in prison. As he was required to serve only a fifth of that sentence–and he’d been locked up longer than that after his arrest in 1988–Turkey didn’t want Parlak back. But the news strengthened DHS’s hand. Parlak had claimed at one point that he was let out of prison because charges were dropped for lack of evidence. Obviously they hadn’t been. DHS picked Parlak up a few days later, and he’s been held without bond ever since.
Marhoefer claims Hacker made at least two errors in her decision. One was to trust the records of the Turkish Security Court despite Parlak’s insistence that he was tortured at its hands. The centerpiece of DHS’s ‘terrorist activity’ case,” Parlak’s lawyers argued, “is a series of factual assertions supported only by the Security Court, and denied by Mr. Parlak. Specifically, DHS relies heavily on the notion that Mr. Parlak was a militarily-trained ‘ARGK unit commander,’ that his group carried ‘rocket launchers,’ that he led a ‘revenge group,’ that he ‘fired his weapon’ during the border incident. . . . The fundamental problem here is that the Security Court ‘conviction records’ are not reliable due to lack of independence and systematic use of torture. . . . U.S. courts exclude evidence procured by torture.”
News Bites
Sun-Times: “Ryan had a blunt reply. ‘F— you, Jack, these are my guys,’ Ryan allegedly said.”
