COMMUNITY PROTESTS METH PROSECUTION OF INDIAN STORE OWNERS

DECATUR, Ga. - Calling federal drug charges against dozens of south
Asian convenience store owners racially biased, several hundred people
rallied Sunday for an end to prosecution in what federal agents have
dubbed "Operation Meth Merchant."

In June, 49 people and 16 corporations, most of them in northwest
Georgia, were charged with supplying everyday items - from antifreeze
to cold medicine - to informants who claimed they were using the
products to make methamphetamine.

In all, 44 of the 49 convenience store clerks and owners charged in
the sting were Indian and many shared the same last name, Patel.

Charges in several of those cases have been dropped, others have
resulted in guilty pleas and some have still not gone to trial.

Supporters of the accused, including the American Civil Liberties
Union, say the sting was rife with problems. They say several
defendants were not even in the country at the time they are accused
of illegally selling the ingredients and that informants used obscure
drug slang, which the clerks, some of whom speak limited English, did
not understand.

"We are not coming from a criminal background," said Upendra Patel,
president of Georgia's Asian-American Convenience Store Association.
"We have thousands of years of culture and civilization and we do not
know what this drug is about. Putting some innocent people behind bars
is not going to solve the drug problem."

Sunday's rally was held in the parking lot of a strip of mostly
Indian-owned shops and restaurants in this city just east of Atlanta.
Many speakers spoke in Indian dialects, and the crowd held signs
reading "Stop the Prosecution" and repeated an Indian civil-rights
chant that translates as: "Against every injustice and oppression, we
will fight!"

Attendees were encouraged to attend a court hearing in several of the
cases scheduled for Tuesday in Rome, Ga.

McCracken Poston, an attorney for one of the accused companies, said
that in one case, a government informant told an Indian store clerk
that he needed supplies to "finish up a cook" - slang for making
methamphetamine.

"They're having to tell the court what that means," Poston said,
referring to footnotes explaining the slang in court documents. "But
they're assuming that (the clerks) know what it means. I think in most
cases they had no idea."

The ACLU and several other civil rights groups have taken up the
cause, investigating whether police and prosecutors selectively
enforced the meth prosecution by targeting retailers with Indian surnames.

Federal prosecutors say race and ethnicity had no role in their
investigation. The say Meth Merchant was aimed at curbing a deadly
problem in a region that has been inundated with the drug in recent
years.

"The United States Attorney's Office prosecutes cases based on the
evidence and the law, not the defendant's race, ethnicity or last
name," Patrick Crosby, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney David Nahmias,
said Sunday in a statement. "We continue working to resolve the dozens
of individual cases that are part of the Meth Merchant
investigation."

Crosby said that attorneys' motions arguing selective prosecution have
been thrown out by a magistrate judge in a ruling that was upheld by a
district court.