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Date Posted: 07:58:12 11/15/08 Sat GMT
Author: Lynn
Subject: Oakland or back to Ireland? Ex-prisoner escapee awaits fate (Oakland Tribune-CA)



Oakland or back to Ireland? Ex-prison escapee awaits fate
By Matt O'Brien
Oakland Tribune
Article Last Updated: 11/14/2008 04:39:56 PM PST

A Texas judge now has the power to set free Oakland resident Pol Brennan or deport him back to the island he escaped from 25 years ago.

Brennan and his wife, Joanna Volz, both testified Friday inside a prison courtroom in Raymondville, Tex., closing a three-day hearing that could determine if the former member of the Irish Republican Army is forced to return to Ireland.

"He's nervous and hopeful," said Jim Byrne, a San Francisco attorney fighting to keep Brennan in the United States.

The case will be decided in a written opinion, which could be issued next week at the earliest.

Brennan has been jailed since January, when agents at a South Texas immigration checkpoint pulled him over during a family vacation and discovered he had overstayed his work permit. The case quickly delved into Brennan's complicated past as a former fugitive and militant in Northern Ireland.

"I have supported the IRA morally and sometimes actively," Brennan told U.S. Immigration Judge William Peterson on Thursday, according to the Associated Press.

Convicted by Northern Ireland courts in 1977 of transporting IRA explosives, Brennan had been serving a 16-year sentence when he broke out of the Maze prison outside Belfast in 1983 and fled to the Bay Area.

He described in court Thursday how he and 37 other prisoners escaped by overpowering guards, donning their uniforms and commandeering a food truck. The plan disintegrated as the prisoners reached
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------------------------------------------------------------------------the front gate, forcing them to abandon the truck and take off on foot.


Brennan later piled into a car with seven others and headed for the border. They holed up in a house with a Protestant family for several hours before starting a three-day hike on foot to the Irish border. IRA members picked them up there and after more than a year in hiding, Brennan flew to the United States as Patrick Joseph Morgan. When the FBI arrested him in Berkeley for applying for a passport with a fake name in 1993, he was calling himself Pol Morgan.

British authorities actively sought to extradite Brennan in the 1990s, at one time comparing the Maze escapees to the American domestic terrorists who bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City. But in the years following the Good Friday peace accords of 1998, the British officially dropped their efforts as both sides agreed to forgive past aggressions.

Byrne said that federal prosecutors are not treating Brennan, who has been living and working openly as an East Bay carpenter, as an alleged terrorist. Instead, they are focusing on criminal convictions that could make Brennan deportable, including his fraudulent passport application, his illegal purchase of a gun in the 1990s and an assault conviction stemming from a workplace fight.

Brennan has argued that deportation would expose him to retaliation in his homeland where Catholics and Protestants now share power, but deep-seeded tensions persist. But if deported, Brennan would be sent to the Republic of Ireland, where sectarian violence is nonexistent. Several hundred IRA inmates have been freed from prison or returned home from abroad without incident.

The deportation, Brennan also argues, would leave Volz, married to Brennan for 19 years, and their daughter in a difficult spot.

"If he goes to Ireland I just don't see how we're going to maintain ourselves. That's a real hardship for us," she said in an interview this week. Volz and Brennan were visiting her aging mother when immigration agents arrested Brennan at a highway checkpoint. She has subletted their Fruitvale home and remained in Texas throughout his nine-month detention.

Volz said that her husband, though familiar with life behind bars, has found his Texas detention "stultifyingly boring," with bad food, poor medical care and limits to the amount of reading material he can have in his cell. At the same time, she said, the unexpected run-in with America's heightened immigration enforcement policies opened the couple's eyes to the more hopeless situations that other immigrants there face.

"His entire adult existence as a free man has been in California, so that's where his life is really," she said. "But, you know, there's a million people with stories like this. I meet so many people in the waiting rooms. It's a real vale of tears."

The Associated Press contributed to this story. Reach Matt O'Brien at 925-977-8463.

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