On the afternoon of August 10, 1966, Rogelio Nieves Negron and a housemate, both of whom had been drinking, argued at the small Riverhead, New York, farm where Negron lived with three co-workers. Negron, twenty-three years old, had come from Arecibo, Puerto Rico, to work as a potato packer, the same job he had held on an earlier stint in the country. He stabbed the housemate, Juan DelValle, who died of the wound. Negron was arrested within the hour. He went to trial for murder months later in Suffolk County, in a courtroom where almost nobody spoke his language and he spoke none of theirs.
Twelve of the fourteen witnesses against him testified in English, a language Negron, who had a sixth-grade Puerto Rican education, neither spoke nor understood. The prosecution had retained an interpreter, Elizabeth Maggipinto, but she worked from home on call and appeared mainly to translate Negron's own testimony and that of the trial's two Spanish-speaking witnesses, plus brief after-the-fact summaries during two ten- to twenty-minute recesses. While the twelve English-speaking witnesses actually testified, nobody translated a word of it for him. His court-appointed lawyer, who spoke no Spanish, had managed about twenty minutes of pretrial conversation with his client through an interpreter, and later testified he could not speak with Negron at all without one. Particularly damaging testimony came from a bilingual police investigator, who told the jury in English that Negron had confessed to the stabbing after DelValle insulted him; Negron denied it, but sat listening to the claim against him as sound he could not parse.
Negron was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced, on March 10, 1967, to twenty years to life. He appealed and lost, and in 1969, still in prison, filed his own pro se petition for a writ of habeas corpus. A federal judge, John Bartels, found that New York had never told him he had any right to an interpreter and ordered him released; the Second Circuit affirmed. Writing for the panel, Judge Irving Kaufman put the four days bluntly: to Negron, most of the trial must have been a babble of voices. Confrontation, the court held, means more than facing an accuser. A defendant has to actually follow what a witness says, closely enough to help his own lawyer question it while the chance still exists. New York argued Negron had waived the right by never asking for a full-time interpreter. Negron testified at his hearing that he had wanted to know what was happening and had no idea anyone was required to tell him. The judges cited that testimony as the clearest sign the waiver argument failed.
The ruling reached past Negron's own case: due process under the Fourteenth Amendment already bound state courts, which is how a federal appeals court could overturn a state conviction in the first place. Within a decade, the case had also prompted Congress to pass the Court Interpreters Act of 1978, which built, for the federal courts, a program for testing and certifying interpreters, assistance that no longer depended on a defendant knowing enough to request it.
A trial is supposed to produce a record that everyone who sat through it actually witnessed. For four days in Suffolk County, only some of the people in that room did.