Man convicted of human smuggling seeks to represent self in appeal

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This article was published 12/12/2025 (274 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A man convicted of human smuggling involving a family that died while crossing into the U.S. from Manitoba, has asked an American court to allow his appeal to continue without a lawyer.

Harshkumar Patel argues his lawyer plagiarized appeal documents and has not been available.

In the motion filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals this week from a prison in Pennsylvania, Patel said he wants to represent himself during the appeal process.

In May, Patel, an Indian national living in the U.S., was sentenced to 10 years in prison for organizing smuggling trips from Manitoba across the U.S. border, including one in which an Indian family froze to death. In 2022, the bodies of 39-year-old Jagdish Patel; his wife, Vaishali, 37; their 11-year-old daughter, Vihangi; and three-year-old son, Dharmik, were found 12 metres from the U.S. border.

Patel’s application states he asked his lawyer, Seth Kretzer, to send him a draft of an opening brief for the appeal process. What Kretzer sent his client appeared to be copied and pasted from Patel’s co-accused in the smuggling case.

Steve Shand was sentenced to six-and-a-half years for his role in the smuggling scheme. Part of Shand’s job was to drive migrants to their destination once they walked over the border into the U.S. Shand filed a notice of appeal in June.

“Counsel copied and pasted the co-defendant’s entire brief, replaced co-defendant’s name with appellant’s and signed his name,” Patel’s application states.

The document says Shand’s appeal brief raised issues with court proceedings, including whether the traffic stop that led to his arrest on the night the Patel family died was justified.

“Had Mr. Kretzer performed even a cursory review of the transcript, counsel would have learnt that appellant never drove any vehicle in the case and therefore had no Fourth Amendment “standing” for the unlawful traffic stop,” the document said.

“After reading these draft versions, (Patel) has concluded that Mr. Kretzer is grossly incompetent and his briefs will be wholly insufficient and inadequate to present anything for review.”

Patel’s application asks the court to file his brief and disregard any future brief filed by Kretzer.

In an email, Kretzer said Patel has a right to represent himself and if the court lets his application move forward he will respect that decision, but he plans to file his brief for his client before its due date at the end of the month.

Kretzer says Patel’s application is nothing other than “superfluous language in a motion to represent oneself in the court.”

Patel’s application also asks the court to publicly reprimand Kratzer and compel him to refund Patel’s legal fees. The document said Patel’s family and friends pooled money to pay the fees.

Patel’s brief claims evidence presented at the trial failed to prove Patel’s involvement in any scheme that involved taking illegal migrants to the U.S. and the jury was not given a clear indication on which illegal migrants were mentioned in text messages between Patel and Shand.

The document states a witness testified the deaths of a the Patel family were due to another person, Fenil Patel, who ignored pleas from them to abort the smuggling.

nicole.buffie@freepress.mb.ca