A young female immigrant from St. Lucia has languished for the past three years in seven detention centers, fighting a deportation order based on being caught with a marijuana joint as a teenager. A permanent legal resident, she pled guilty to the charge, uninformed of the immigration consequences of her sentence or that there were easy ways of avoiding it, by, for example, taking an alternate plea as a youth offender.

The director of the Immigrant Defense Project of the New York State Defender’s Association, Marianne Yang, said many legal immigrants take plea settlements without realizing accepting certain sentences for even seemingly minor crimes could get them deported.

“Advisal as it stands in New York is wholly inadequate in protecting immigrants from the risk of deportation,” said Ms. Yang, who will be one of the immigration experts testifying at a City Council hearing today.

The Council’s immigration committee will consider a resolution in support of legislation introduced in the State Assembly that would amend the Criminal Procedure Law.

The change would require that, prior to the acceptance of a guilty plea, New York State courts advise non-citizens that such a settlement may result in deportation, exclusion from admission to America, or denial of naturalization.

Under current state law, courts must only provide warning to defendants on trial for felonies of immigration consequences of a guilty plea, even though misdemeanors and violations – from turnstile jumping to shoplifting – can also be deportable offenses.

The Association of the Bar of the City of New York criticized the law in a report last spring.

“Without a warning, many non-citizen defendants plead guilty to lesser New York offenses unaware of these potential immigration consequences,” the report found, endorsing a proposed bill by State Senator Olga Mendez, the Republican from the Bronx who lost a bid at re-election. “The interests of justice require a warning mechanism that puts the non-citizen defendant on notice, so that he may make an informed choice as to whether, and to what, to plead guilty.”

Critics have raised concerns that a change in law could lead to a large increase in the number of non-citizens disputing their sentences or that it is an unnecessary change.

State Senator Eric Schneiderman, a Democrat from Manhattan who is the author of a State Senate bill to reform the criminal procedure, said the Republican-controlled Senate will move on this issue “only after substantial public pressure” blaming a combination of technical issues and an underlying “hostility to immigrants.”

Still, he said he was encouraged by today’s City Council meeting and felt recent changes in Albany would ensure it would be “an issue in the upcoming legislative system.”

“It’s the beginning of a process of raising public consciousness about something that is an absolute crisis for a lot of people,” Mr. Schneiderman said. “It is hard to think of a more egregious example of a defendant being forced to act against their own self interest, or being induced into a plea of misrepresentation, than someone who plead guilty without being informed they are going to be deported because of that plea,” Mr. Schneiderman said, adding, “That’s just an abuse of defendants by the criminal justice system.”