MINNEAPOLIS – A federal judge on Tuesday rejected requests for new trials for two men convicted on human smuggling charges in the deaths of four members of a family from India who froze to death while trying to cross the Canadian border into Minnesota during a blizzard in 2022.
U.S. District Judge John Tunheim declined to set aside the guilty verdicts that a jury returned last November against Harshkumar Ramanlal Patel and Steve Anthony Shand. His order clears the way for the two defendants to take their cases to a federal appeals court after he sentences them on May 7.
Attorneys for both men argued that the evidence was insufficient.
“But this was not a close case,” …