A jury deliberated for less than 90 minutes Friday before convicting two men on human smuggling charges in a case where a family from India froze to death in Manitoba while trying to walk across the Canada-U.S. border.
Steve Shand of Florida and Harshkumar Patel, an Indian national arrested in Chicago, were each found guilty on all four counts they faced related to bringing unauthorized people into the U.S., transporting them and profiting from it.
“This trial exposed the unthinkable cruelty of human smuggling and of those criminal organizations that value profit and greed over humanity,” U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger told reporters after the verdicts….