Perhaps prompted by my previous post about how lovely everyone is getting along in Lewiston, a reader just sent me this update of a story we first told you about in June. Mohammed Mukhtar was charged then with raping a 50-year-old woman in Portland, but it was not clear until now when he was born.
Here is the story from the Portland Press Herald on January 15th:
PORTLAND – A Portland teenager who fought efforts to prosecute him as an adult for allegedly breaking into the room of a woman and raping her last year, gave up his fight Monday and will be tried as an adult.
Mohammed Mukhtar, now 18 by all accounts, appeared in a juvenile proceeding in Cumberland County Unified Criminal for what was supposed to be the third day of a four-day hearing that started in November.
But he withdrew his application to fight prosecutors’ motions Monday afternoon after only two witnesses had testified.
Since Mukhtar was first arrested on May 26, the case against him has yo-yoed back and forth between juvenile and adult court.
He was first charged as an adult, when Portland police used the birthday he gave them: Jan. 1, 1994.
Mukhtar admits, in a video taken of him at the Portland Police Department just before his arrest, that he broke into the 50-year-old woman’s apartment on High Street, took off his shorts and underwear and put on a condom.
He denied raping her.
After his arrest, Mukhtar’s attorney, Jonathan Berry, successfully argued that Mukhtar had been assigned the Jan. 1 birthday when he came to the U.S. as a refugee from Somalia and that his actual birthday is Oct. 25, 1994, making him a juvenile at the time of his arrest.
[….]
In the first phase of the hearing in November, Judge Richard Mulhern ruled that prosecutors had demonstrated probable cause for the charges against Mukhtar — gross sexual assault, burglary and trespassing.
A model refugee student likely resettled by Catholic Charities.
The second witness was Portland Police Officer Coreena Behnke, a school resource officer assigned to Portland High School where Mukhtar was a student.
She documented 17 different occasions during which Portland police had contact with Mukhtar.
Adult court means big jail time!
Though the case against Mukhtar won’t change, the potential penalty in adult court is much stiffer.
If convicted as a juvenile, he would serve no more than three years in juvenile detention.
As an adult, Mukhtar faces 20 years in prison.
Look! Really! Why waste taxpayer money keeping this guy in prison? Let’s just deport him back to Somalia after he is found guilty. Didn’t we just learn that Somalia wants its people to return to Somalia to help rebuild the homeland! Put him in Somalia’s army, let him fight against al-Shabaab!
LOL! I wonder if Ms. Lindkvist of my previous post would characterize what Mukhtar is charged with as “micro-aggression” or “macro-aggression?”
For new readers we have resettled more than 100,000 Somali refugees to cities large and small in the US over the last 25 years. See one of the most widely read posts here at RRW. In three years since 9/11 ( Bush years 2004, 2005, 2006) the number of Somalis arriving topped 10,000 per year. Those refugees then began bringing in the family (chain migration!) until 2008 when shock of shocks! the State Department discovered that as many as 30,000 Somalis had lied about their kinship and weren’t related at all. The State Department then closed the “family reunification” program for Somalis. It has recently been re-opened for new and legit family members, but they have no intention of finding and deporting the liars.