In 2008, Maria Isavel Vasquez Jimenez died after pruning grapes for nine hours in the California heat. It was nearly 100 degrees. She was two months pregnant and 17 years old. Authorities there charged the farm supervisors in her death, accusing them of not allowing Jimenez to get water or shade. Today, the two pleaded guilty in a deal that allows them to avoid jail time.
Maria De Los Angeles Colunga, the owner of now-defunct Merced Farm Labor, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of failing to provide shade. She received 40 hours of community service, serve three years of probation and pay a $370 fine.
Her brother, Elias Armenta, who was the company's former safety coordinator, pleaded guilty to a felony count of failing to follow safety regulations that resulted in death. He received 480 hours of community service, five years of probation and a $1,000 fine.
The deals also banned both from ever again working in farm labor contracting.
The United Farm Workers of America is less than pleased with the verdict. In a statement, the group's president, Arturo S. Rodriguez, notes that the conditions leading to Jimenez's death were the result of regulatory failures. According to them, the farm operator had previously been fined by the state's OSHA department, and Jimenez's uncle had been fired after he tried to alert officials to his niece's death.
Our system of government repeatedly failed Maria Isavel and the other 14 California farm workers who died from the heat because of lax enforcement of the heat regulation designed to prevent exactly these types of tragedies. Unless farm workers can find a more effective way to protect themselves, these needless tragedies will continue.
Seeing the criminal-justice system operate up close can be infuriating. What's really frustrating for progressives is to see how unevenly justice is handed out and how much leeway judges have whenever they can decide defendants are "basically good people" who made a mistake. My inclination is to protect defendants from prison as much as possible most of the time, but avoiding jail is most often a thing the well-connected are particularly apt at doing -- they know how to play the game so that they seem remorseful, rehabilitated, and not worthy of harsh punishment. I'm not sure what happened in this case, but I would rather people responsible for someone's death be sent to jail than see small-time drug users be punished as harshly as they often are in our system.
