A federal judge on Tuesday declined to overturn Hannah Dugan’s obstruction of justice conviction, leaving in place the jury verdict that came after she was found guilty of helping a man evade immigration officers at a courthouse. The ruling means the Hannah Dugan obstruction conviction will stand.
Dugan, who resigned from the Milwaukee County Circuit Court after the verdict, now faces the next step in a case that has stayed tied to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman did not immediately set a sentencing date, but his decision keeps open the prospect of punishment after the jury convicted Dugan on Dec. 19.
Her lawyers had pressed Adelman to throw out the conviction, arguing that an April appeals ruling in a Virginia immigration case should control here. In that case, an immigrant who had been detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, later escaped, was recaptured and then indicted for obstructing a pending immigration proceeding. The appeals court said the ICE action was not a “pending proceeding” under the federal obstruction law, and Dugan’s defense said the same logic should apply because the officers seeking Eduardo Flores-Ruiz were not part of a court proceeding and the filing of a warrant alone does not make one.
Adelman rejected that view. He said the attempted arrest of Flores-Ruiz did count as a pending proceeding because, unlike a random encounter, the operation was planned and targeted. He also wrote that ICE can issue its own warrants and carry out a removal without going through a court, and that difference mattered in this case. Prosecutors had argued the Virginia case was not the same and that other cases supported Dugan’s conviction.
The judge’s ruling closes the main post-verdict challenge for now, but it does not end the case. Dugan faces up to five years in prison, though federal sentencing guidelines generally call for probation in cases like hers, where the defendant has no criminal history and the crime was nonviolent. She had been a judge for nine years before resigning two weeks after her conviction, amid threats of impeachment from Republican state lawmakers. Her legal team said only that “The court’s decision is wrong.”
