Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life

Life wasn’t so bad for the women who worked in a multistate immigrant prostitution ring broken by federal agents last year, the defense lawyer for Juan Balderas-Orosco — who managed the ring’s Austin-area brothels — argued at his sentencing Friday.

The women had cell phones and periods of freedom, both of which provided them opportunity to escape, and they were allowed to keep part of the money they earned from having sex with at times up to dozens of men a day, Kristin Etter noted.

Robbie at Urban Grounds found that story and righteously lays into self-described liberal lawyer Kristin Etter:

Did this über-educated, powerful, white female lawyer really just argue that these Latina sex-slaves “didn’t have it so bad” because they were granted a few moments of freedom (vs. the 100% periods of freedom most of us have come to expect and enjoy)?

I understand she needs to mount a zealous defense of her client, the filthy human-trafficking slaver-pimp who imported these women illegally from all over Latin America and kept them working nationwide...

Those brothels were part of a national crime network that prosecutors say included brothels in at least 13 states and more than 250 Hispanic women who were smuggled into the United States from countries in Central and South America, according to the documents and testimony.

The women were moved to a different brothel every week, with two to three women working at a given location at a given time, IRS Special Agent Mike Lamberth testified before Sparks on Friday. They were threatened with loaded weapons at each location and weren't allowed to decline sex with any customer, he said.

...but I don't think Etter's zealous defense needed to go that far.

I guess when she says whoring yourself out for Balderas isn't really all that bad a way to make a buck, she knows whereof she speaks--although no one held a gun to her head when she said that.

(P.S. Many slaves in the antebellum South actually bought their freedom, I was told once. The mere tenuous privilege of accumulating money--even with the possibility of using it to pay for your freedom, which these women didn't have--doesn't make you free. I can't find a linkable cite, but the Wikipedia entry on slavery confirms it and references Larry Koger, "Black Slave Owners; Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860")

N.B. to my Okie readers, all three of y'all: Balderas was arrested in Oklahoma City, where he ran a "franchise" of his main operation.