Posted on 11/13/2003 10:19:29 AM PST by Tumbleweed_Connection
NEW YORK (AP) - A woman who was accused of accepting money to marry 27 illegal immigrants so they could get residency and work permits pleaded guilty Wednesday to one count of filing a false instrument. Dezerrie Cortes, 40, had been charged with perjury and falsifying business records. In exchange for a plea deal that will get her six months in jail and 4 1/2 years' probation, she admitted lying Jan. 8, 2000, on an application for a licence to marry a man from India, saying she had never been married before, prosecutors said. State Supreme Court Justice Micki Scherer will sentence Cortes on Jan. 7. If Cortes had been convicted after trial, she could have gotten up to seven years in prison on the perjury count alone. Prosecutors said Cortes received 27 marriage licences between 1984 and 2002 so she could marry men from Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Pakistan, Colombia, Mexico and a few other countries. She never divorced or lived with any of the men, prosecutors said. In court papers filed when she was arrested, Cortes said that "in all these cases I needed the money." "I was saving to go back to Florida to live with my two children and start my life over again," she said. "Please forgive me. I will never do it again." Cortes also applied for marriage licences in Florida, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau said. Prosecutors said they believe she also may have gotten licences to wed in other counties in the New York metropolitan area. "I figured she should go in the Guinness Book of Records," Morgenthau said.
I hope they don't all show up for conjugal visits at the same time...
Why do I not believe her?
The branch head at the Calfornia Motor Vehicle on Moorpark Road in Thousand Oaks said that she had issued this woman 27 driver's licenses because she had presented authentic matricula cards.
The black woman in charge of the polling station on Martin Luther King in San Francisco's Mission District had registered this woman to vote 27 times because she had presented what were certainly authentic California driver's licenses.
In an extremely close race in 2004, California Senator Barbara Boxer was reelected by the thinest of margins, 24 votes.
When will people learn that they can't cheat the legal profession?
It's always "for the children". What a crock of sh**.
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