carson city:

Court rejects appeal in $100,000 bogus check case

Monday, June 29, 2009 | 4:40 p.m.

CARSON CITY – The Nevada Supreme Court has rejected the appeal of a Hong Kong woman who sought to withdraw a guilty plea to passing a $100,000 bogus check at the Mirage in 2006.

Ka Mui Ng says the terms of the plea agreement were never fully explained, including that she would be barred from the United States in the future.

As part if her agreement to plead guilty to a felony charge of passing a check without sufficient funds, Ng was placed on five years probation and ordered to pay $110,075 in restitution. She was also barred from entering a casino to gamble.

Ng came to the Mirage with a “Mr. Lee” in January 2006. She maintains that “Lee” and casino host David Wu approached her and persuaded her to sign a marker for $100,000. She said she explained she did not have that much money in the Hang Seng Bank in Hong Kong.

Ng said she was assured the Mirage would not draw the money from her account and the majority of the chips were given to “Lee.” She said she did not know how the money was used and she returned to Hong Kong.

When she returned to Las Vegas two years later she was arrested. In her appeal, she said the translator provided by the district court never read her the guilty plea agreement in Chinese.

The Clark County District Attorney’s Office said Cantonese Interpreter Alex Young was provided for Ng, who said she understood Cantonese. It said the plea agreement was read to her in Cantonese and informed her she could be excluded from entering the United States.

The Supreme Court said the possibility of being barred from the United States was an immigration consequence of the guilty plea and did not affect the voluntariness of the plea.

Discussion: 3 comments so far…

By whats_in_the_box

6/29/09 at 8:48 p.m.

Suggest removal

If she's going to be banned from the US forever, she should be able to change her plea. It's a little extreme, now the casinos and their courts are banning people from the country, what about the illegals working in the kitchen?
By LasVegas2009

6/29/09 at 9:35 p.m.

Suggest removal

The devil made me do it. That defense rarely if ever works.

Yeah I bet half the staff are here illegal if not more like 90%. Was does INS never raid the casinos??
By LasVegasLawyerGal

6/30/09 at 6:16 a.m.

Suggest removal

The difficulty is that the U.S. Supreme Court has long seen immigration bars as a "collateral", rather than a "direct" consequence of a plea agreement. Given the essentially automatic operation of immigration law regarding removal and exclusion, this legal reasoning is defective on so many levels, but until the U.S. Supreme Court reconsiders the issue, injustice will continue to be inflicted on people like Ms. Ng. The other question is whether Ms. Ng's attorney was effective in their representation of her during the plea hearing. If not, a habeas petition may be in order.