Ghanian Found Guilty in Mutilation Hoax

NEW YORK - A woman was convicted of perjury and other charges Wednesday for claiming she was a disgraced tribal princess who would face sexual mutilation if deported to Ghana.

The federal court jury in Brooklyn deliberated about five hours before finding Regina Danson, 33, guilty of lying to immigration officials in a case that initially generated outrage over the practice of female genital mutilation in Africa and elsewhere.

Danson, who is free on $200,000 bond, faces up to 16 months in prison and deportation at sentencing on March 23.

"Her biggest fear is deportation," defense attorney Dawn Cardi told reporters after the verdict was read. "There may be people in Ghana who feel angry about her being found to have slandered Ghana."

The defendant was first detained in 1997 when she tried to enter the country with a falsified passport at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport.

At an asylum hearing, she claimed that as a "queen mother" in waiting, she had violated tribal law by becoming a Christian, secretly falling in love and losing her virginity. If forced to return to Ghana, tribal elders would punish her by cutting her clitoris, she told an immigration judge.

"I will be mutilated, and my lover will be found and executed," she said in an affidavit. "After that, I will have to live the rest of my life in shame."

The judge denied the application, noting Ghana had outlawed genital mutilation in 1994 and that her identity was in doubt. An appeals court reversed the decision in 1999 after she attracted support from feminist Gloria Steinem, actress Julia Roberts and then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

But in 2000, an Immigration and Naturalization Service investigation concluded Danson's story was a fabrication. Investigators alleged she was a former Ghanaian hotel worker who assumed the identity of another woman named Adelaide Abankwah.

Danson was indicted last year, only days before the statute of limitations would have run out on perjury, false-statement and passport fraud charges.

At trial, tribal chief Nana Kwa Bonko testified that Danson was not part of the tribe's royal family, and that mutilation was not practiced in his region of Ghana.

Female genital mutilation, typically performed on girls before puberty, ranges from cutting the tip of the clitoris to removing all external genitals.

According to Amnesty International, an estimated 135 million of the world's girls and women have undergone genital mutilation. It is practiced extensively in Africa and is common in some countries in the Middle East.