Many years ago, when I was clerking for a federal judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (which covers Texas and the US-Mexican border), the court heard a case involving the Shining Path that bothers me even now.
The case was about a Peruvian asylum seeker who was a management employee at a business that had resisted recognizing a Shining Path-controlled union. The Shining Path threatened to kill him, as a result of which he fled to the US. Legally, the case turned on whether the threat to his life was based on his "political" views, or was the result of a merely "economic" dispute over the status of the union. In the former case, he would be eligible for asylum; in the latter, he would not.
I cannot reveal internal deliberations. But I believe the Peruvian had a good chance of prevailing on the basis that, for Maoists like the Shining Path, there is no distinction between the "political" and the "economic." Opposing their union unavoidably involved opposing their "political" agenda, as well. The two were one and the same, and everyone involved knew it.
But, at oral argument, one of the judges asked the asylum seeker's lawyer whether his client was the victim of an economic dispute. The idiot lawyer admitted that it was indeed economic. The judges predictably ended up ruling against him.
The case haunts me to this day. I can only hope that, if (as is likely) he was deported, this man wasn't killed by the Shining Path when he was forced to return to Peru.
This sad tale helped inspire me to advocate the abolition of the distinction between "political" and "economic" refugees. But I doubt that would be much consolation to the victim in this case.
If there is another lesson to be learned here, it's that sometimes a really bad lawyer can be worse than none at all. If the asylum seeker had had to proceed pro se, he might well have been better off.
