Northwestern Assistant DA convicts Worcester ICE protester

A crowd of supporters gathered around a courtroom door in Northampton on Wednesday, awaiting the six-person jury’s verdict in the trial of former Worcester City Councilor Etel Haxhiaj. Steven Gagne, the Northwestern District’s first assistant district attorney, popped open the door just enough to look at a group of Worcester police officers down the hall. Beaming, he gave them a thumbs up, waved them over. They walked past the crowd of Haxhiaj supporters to enter the courtroom before the public had been allowed back in. Supporters asked the court guards why they were being let in, and the court guards responded by making the cops shuffle back out. 

The jury read the verdict: guilty on one charge of assault and battery against a public employee, not guilty of one charge of interfering with police. 

Gagne then moved to his sentencing recommendation.

“This is a position in which, frankly, I don’t think anybody, including myself, relishes being in right now, where we’ve sat through a difficult trial. This was a difficult situation,” he said. “But fortunately, the jury did reaffirm what we think is a very important principle in this case, which is, there’s a line between peaceful protest and interfering or assaulting police officers who are trying their best to do their job in a very difficult situation.”

Haxhiaj was one of three Worcester residents charged by police after an ICE raid last May in which federal agents seized a woman with an open asylum claim in broad daylight. Agents surrounded a car carrying the woman’s two daughters until she arrived. Dozens of community members showed up to resist the deportation. Worcester police responded, clearing a path for the ICE vehicle, and tackled one of the women’s daughters as she ran after it. 

Charges, including reckless child endangerment, disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest against the daughter were shortly dropped. The Northwestern District Attorney’s Office picked up the case against the two community members charged, Haxhiaj and Ashley Spring, after the Worcester County District Attorney recused himself over a conflict of interest. Spring accepted a plea deal Gagne offered earlier this week, leaving only Haxhiaj to stand trial. Over Tuesday and Wednesday, five police officers, two community members and Haxhiaj herself testified. The jury deliberated for about three hours. 

After the verdict, Gagne recommended a sentence of one year probation and 10 hours of community service a month. He argued it was an appropriate punishment for “certain decisions that Ms. Haxhiaj made to intervene, to interject herself into the fray, to not obey lawful orders by the Worcester Police Department.” 

“So I think the mere fact that she now stands convicted of assault and battery on a police officer is a significant sanction in and of itself. It does reaffirm that she broke the law. She crossed the line in this case.”

Throughout the trial, culminating in his closing argument, Gagne sought to cast Haxhiaj’s actions as acting “above the law.” He showed clips of her reacting to pushes and shoves from ICE agents to demonstrate her “mental state” as someone who “got in the scrum.”

After Gagne’s sentencing recommendation, Judge Zachary Hillman retired to his chambers to read 56 letters of support for Haxhiaj, a former city councilor. The letters were from community members, as well as state and local elected officials from across the region. When he returned, he reduced the sentence to six months probation and 40 hours of community service. 

The punishment was only slightly more severe than a plea deal Gagne had offered Haxhiaj in the weeks leading up to the trial. The deal, as proposed by Gagne, required she sign onto an apology letter to the police. It read, in part “…no one has the right to physically assault someone with whom they disagree — including police officers, whose jobs are difficult and demanding enough without getting shoved or splashed. Ms. Haxhiaj and Ms. Spring did not mean the officers any harm, and they apologize for their actions toward them on May 8.”

Outside the courtroom, speaking to supporters, Haxhiaj addressed this demand for an apology directly.

“The special prosecutor in this case asked that I repent by issuing a direct apology in exchange for dropping the charges with probation,” Haxhiaj said. “I chose the truth. We must challenge prosecutors who, as constitutional attorney John Bonifaz said just a while ago, use their prosecutorial discretion to pursue charges that are not in the interest of justice.”

She maintained her innocence and reframed the trial along lines that Hillman had expressly forbade in the courtroom: as a political persecution. She called the charges fabricated by police union officials who abuse their power, and connected them to a lawsuit Thomas Duffy, president of the New England Police Benevolent Association Local 911, filed against Tom Marino, editor of This Week In Worcester, for reporting on his history of complaints and role in pressing charges against Haxhiaj. (Before the trial began, Gagne filed a motion to bar the defense from bringing Duffy in to testify. The defense argued Duffy’s testimony would be relevant to the political context of the charges: specifically, why police filed them four days after the fact. The judge sided with Gagne.) 

During the two-day trial, Gagne repeatedly showed a two-second slow motion clip that appeared to show Haxhiaj touching Worcester Police Officer Shauna McGuirk. The defense argued the touching was in the context of McGuirk tossing Haxhiaj away from the ICE SUV carrying the deportee. Multiple angles show McGuirk tossing Haxhiaj. Haxhiaj was next to the daughter of the target of the operation, who clung to the sideview mirror. On the stand, Haxhiaj said she was there to comfort and safely move the young woman away from the masked ICE agents and Worcester cops shouting commands at her in a language she didn’t understand. 

Gagne’s cross examination of Haxhiaj began with three questions: “Were you elected to disobey orders from the Worcester Police Department?” “Were you elected to get into the middle of police situations and put your hands on officers?” “Were you elected to shove federal officers?” 

For a few minutes, Gagne grilled Haxhiaj on several interactions with ICE agents he’d plucked from body camera footage, accusing Haxhiaj of “swatting” the hand of one agent, and frequently accusing her of getting in what he called, alternately, “the scrum” or “the mix.” Hillman allowed the testimony to go on, then afterward instructed the jury to disregard all evidence presented of any touching of anyone besides McGuirk. The charges, he said, are limited to those interactions. 

Gagne’s closing statement wasn’t, however. He used an extended metaphor of the jurors trying to back out of their driveway to characterize the situation ICE agents found themselves in on May 8.

“I imagine most of you probably drove to court today.” he said. “As you were backing out, or pulling out of your driveway or your parking spot, imagine if there had been a protester at the end of your driveway or in the street holding a sign for whatever cause, ‘save the whales,’ ‘stop the wars,’ all great causes, right? But they’re blocking your ability to get out. You ask them to move and they don’t. I’m guessing at some point maybe you call the police for help. The police show up and they get, ‘Excuse me, man, you got to move. I’m sorry, sir, you can’t do this right here.’”

If these protestors refuse to move, Gagne said, “common sense says that the Worcester police would have the right to then take it up a notch and put hands on that person to try to move them away from your driveway.”