Originally posted by the Voice of America.
Voice of America content is produced by the Voice of America,
a United States federal government-sponsored entity, and is in
the public domain.


US Deports Woman Who Lied About Role in Rwandan Genocide

Associated Press

   CONCORD, N.H. - A woman who served a 10-year sentence in U.S. prison
   for lying about her role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide to obtain
   American citizenship and lost her bid for a new trial has been deported
   to Rwanda, her lawyer said Saturday.

   BeatriceMunyenyeziwas convicted and sentenced in 2013 in the U.S. state
   of New Hampshire. She served a 10-year sentence in the state of Alabama
   and had faced deportation.

   She lost her latest court battle in March, when the 1st U.S. Circuit
   Court of Appeals upheld a federal district judge's rejection of her
   petition challenging how the jury was instructed during her trial in
   federal court in New Hampshire.

   "Yes, that did happen," her lawyer, Richard Guerriero, wrote in an
   email Saturday when asked whetherMunyenyezihad been deported to Rwanda.
   He said he believed she arrived in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, on
   Friday.

   Munyenyeziwas convicted of lying about her role as a commander of one
   of the notorious roadblocks where Tutsis were singled out for
   slaughter. She denied affiliation with any political party, despite her
   husband's leadership role in the extremist Hutu militia party.

   She requested a new trial based on a 2017 U.S. Supreme Court decision
   limiting the government's ability to strip citizenship from immigrants
   who lied during the naturalization process.

   Munyenyezialleged that the jury was given inaccurate instructions on
   her criminal liability. A judge denied her request, saying that even if
   the instruction fell short, the error was harmless beyond a reasonable
   doubt.

   As part of her appeal,Munyenyezi'strial lawyers, who are now New
   Hampshire superior court judges, said in court documents that they
   would have presentedMunyenyezi'scase differently if the U.S. Supreme
   Court decision had been law during her trial.

   They added that they believe if the jury had instructed based on the
   court decision, "the verdict may have been different."

   At the time, her lawyers portrayed her as the victim of lies by Rwandan
   witnesses who hadnever beforeimplicated her through nearly two decades
   of investigations and trials, even when testifying against her husband
   and his mother before the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda.

   U.S. prosecutors said thatMunyenyeziwasn't entitled to a new trial and
   could have raised a similar legal argument at the time because it had
   come up in other cases. But her defense lawyers said they were not
   aware that other lawyers had raised the issue.

   In the 2017 U.S. Supreme Court case, a Serb who emigrated from Bosnia
   to the United States lied about the reasons she feared persecution, her
   husband's service in the Bosnian Army, and his role in the slaughter of
   thousands of Bosnian Muslim civilians.

   She asked that the jury be instructed that her citizenship could be
   stripped if the government proved that her lies had influenced the
   decision to grant her citizenship. A court declined to do that, but the
   Supreme Court reversed that decision.