Former Stockton couple gets prison for abusing workers in federal human trafficking case
A former Stockton couple convicted in a human trafficking case have each been sentenced to 15 years and eight months in federal prison for physically abusing, exploiting and threatening workers they hired from India and Nepal under false pretenses.
Satish Kartan, 46, who now lives in Sacramento, was sentenced Thursday by U.S. District Judge Morrison C. England Jr., according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Sacramento. The judge also ordered Kartan to pay $15,657 in restitution to three victims, in part to cover their back wages and other losses.
Federal prosecutors said Kartan’s wife, Sharmistha Barai, was sentenced on Oct. 2. In March 2019, the married couple was found guilty of conspiracy to obtain forced labor and two counts of obtaining forced labor. Kartan also was found guilty of fraud in foreign labor contracting.
“Kartan earned his sentence by the systematic abuse and exploitation of vulnerable women for the benefit of his wife and family,” said U.S. Attorney McGregor W. Scott said in the news release. “He verbally abused multiple victims, withheld basic sustenance from them, and physically intimidated them.”
Scott also said the victims now know Kartan will never be able to abuse them again.
From February 2014 through October 2016, Kartan and Barai hired people from overseas to do domestic work in their Stockton home. The prosecutors have said the couple made false claims about wages and work duties in advertisements seeking workers online and in India-based newspapers.
After the workers arrived in Stockton, Kartan and Barai forced them to work 18 hours a day while depriving them of sleep and food, according to the prosecutors. They said few of the workers were paid a wage.
The defendants kept the workers from leaving their jobs “by threatening them, by creating an atmosphere of fear, control and disempowerment,” prosecutors said shortly after their conviction. Several workers also were threatened that attempts to leave their jobs would be reported to police or immigration officials.
Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband for the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division called Kartan’s abuse the victims “unconscionable.”
“The United States abolished slavery and involuntary servitude more than 150 years ago,” Dreiband said in Thursday’s news release. “Yet, inhuman forced labor and deprivations of liberty and dignity persist because human traffickers proliferate modern-day slavery, and endeavor to exploit their fellow human beings for profit and other gruesome purposes.”
