Illegal Alien Says Drug Sentence Too Cruel

A thrice-convicted illegal immigrant drug dealer long protected by a sanctuary state is frantically trying to evade a life prison sentence by arguing that it’s “cruel and unusual punishment” in his native Mexico.

In a classic only-in-America fable, the illegal alien (Vicente Corona) had previously been deported after one of the convictions but returned to the U.S. to continue peddling cocaine for Mexican drug cartels. He operated his criminal enterprise in California, which offers illegal immigrants sanctuary, and was protected from deportation after two state drug convictions. 

A separate federal conviction actually got the Mexican illegal immigrant deported in the early 1990s, but he returned to his beloved Golden State where he remained for years before getting busted again on federal charges and subsequently convicted in a massive mail order cocaine conspiracy. 

The conviction means a mandatory life sentence for Corona who was found guilty last year by a federal jury in Tennessee of supplying a network that funneled through the mail millions of dollars in cocaine from California to Knoxville. A federal judge flatly rejected Corona’s pathetic argument this week that life in prison is cruel and unusual punishment. 

U.S. District Judge Thomas Phillips said the illegal immigrant should have stayed in Mexico the first time he got deported from the United States if he wanted to escape the nation’s drug laws, pointing out that he illegally re-entered the country and continued his drug distribution activities. Corona is scheduled to be sentenced in March. 

Illegal immigrants have taken bold actions in U.S. courts over the years, suing the government for discrimination and law enforcement agencies for racial profiling and civil rights violations. Just last month an illegal immigrant from El Salvador sued a Maryland sheriff’s department for violating her constitutional rights by detaining her based on her ethnicity and a few months ago a group of illegal aliens in Connecticut sued the federal agents that arrested them, claiming their constitutional rights were violated in the raids that led to their apprehension.