This isn't a guy who built one thing for the wrong person, but many over the course of multiple years. It blew up in his face, but that is the risk of working with very dangerous people at the edge of the law.
The bottom line is, Anaya didn't play ball with the DEA. They went after him to punish him for not cooperating, not because he broke any laws. It's a travesty and a scathing indictment of the current legal situation in the United States that he could even be charged with this crime at all in a state he'd never set foot in, much less to have a conviction against him.
Exactly. 10,000x this. The fact that 90% of charges don't go to trial means that the whole thing is rigged towards scaring people into accepting guilty pleas. If he had accepted a plea he probably would have gone to jail for a very short amount of time. By protesting his innocence - which he clearly believed - he effectively lost 10x more than if he had just given in. That is horrifying.
Certainly, he wouldn't be spending 24 years in jail if he had played ball with the DEA. Instead, he decided that his criminal co-conspirators were dangerous enough that he shouldn't play ball and instead risk jail time.
ADDED: To elaborate, conspiring to commit a crime is itself a crime, and has been for a long time in the U.S. There's no need to worry about ex-post facto laws, as the parent claims. You can participate in the commission of a crime doing any number of normally legal activities, such as driving (e.g. driving a getaway car). Your intent to commit a crime is what matters. The prosecution established that Mr. Anaya knowingly assisted the drug smuggling operation in concealing its shipments, hence the conspiracy conviction.
In addition, the physical location of Mr. Anaya isn't relevant to his prosecution in Kansas. He was prosecuted in Kansas because the criminal conspiracy involved transporting drugs into the state, using his modded cars.
However, what he did is against the law - building compartments for drugs. He built compartments for drugs. The judge correctly decided that Anaya consciously tried to evade this law by use of codewords etc. all the while his client are traveling with 800K cash in hidden compartments, asking for smell-resistance, making trips to Tijuana. "Oh, technically, no one used the magic word, 'heroine'" is not a defense. He knew what he was doing. This is why you have a jury - to determine intent. His intentions were to build compartments for everyone, which he doesn't deny, and get away with it based on technicalities.
Do you have a cite for that?
I'll just tell you. You are mistaken. Building compartments for drugs is not illegal. This fact is not in dispute. That he was sentenced to prison for it anyway is the reason for the debate.
In California it is. Says it about 4 times in the linked article. The debate is whether or not he knew they were being used for drugs.
There is no federal law against building hidden compartments, even if they're made with the sole intent of smuggling drugs.
He was charged under federal law. It does not matter what California law is.
The law is not code. It is interpreted. It's not some shocking interpretation to say that, when you find yourself looking for circumlocutions and code words to avoid directly saying the word "drugs", you know you're helping drug smugglers smuggle drugs. Which is a crime. And he got rung up for it.
(Which is not to say that the sentence even remotely fits the crime, but to say no crime was committed is disingenuous.)
And contributing to the commission of a crime is conspiracy.
No, this is incorrect. That is not the legal requirement to obtain a conviction for conspiracy. Every single adult in the United States would probably be at risk of criminal liability if it were.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_which_is_not_forbidd...
* Distribution of cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana are explicitly forbidden by federal law, dating back at least to the mid-1900s.
* Conspiring to violate federal law has been explicitly illegal since 1867. [1]
The prosecution showed that Mr. Avaya knowingly participated in a conspiracy to violate laws related to drug trafficking. He wasn't prosecuted just for making "traps" in cars, but rather for knowingly making "traps" in cars for the specific purpose of transporting illegal drugs.