San Diego

U.S. Magistrate Harry McCue on Monday suspended the 45-day jail sentence imposed on a young Irish woman in an immigration case by another magistrate who had said that prosecutors gave her favored treatment over Mexican defendants.

McCue, instead, sentenced the woman, Bridgit Frances O’Grady, 22, to six months’ probation.

O’Grady has been free on bail since April, when her lawyer filed an appeal of the 45-day sentence imposed by U.S. Magistrate Joseph Schmitt. O’Grady had pleaded guilty to a charge that she altered her expired visa so she could remain in the United States, and prosecutors recommended that she be placed on probation.

However, Schmitt rejected probation, saying, “If a Mexican had done the same thing, I suspect the government would have recommended jail time.”

In an appeal, O’Grady’s lawyer, John Lanahan of the Federal Defenders Office, said that Schmitt ignored “considerable” mitigating evidence, including the fact that O’Grady cooperated fully with prosecutors and freely admitted what she had done. O’Grady “became the recipient of a sentence based on an erroneous perception that she, on the basis of her Irish ancestry, was receiving special treatment and that she should be punished, not for what she had done, but for what the government was doing for her,” Lanahan said in his appeal.

O’Grady has been fired from her job at the La Costa Resort & Spa and will probably be deported, Lanahan said.