(Agencies)
Updated: 2007-11-25 16:40

Defense attorney Rostal has countered by accusing the government of picking on a poorly educated immigrant.

Her client's only offense, she said, was her inability to grasp Western attitudes and highly technical regulations regarding bushmeat.

Defense papers also argue that the US demand for the meat involved in the Manneh case — from Africa's green monkey population — is "too small to have any significance for conservation."

Manneh, 39, testified last year that before arriving in the United States more than 25 years ago, monkey meat was critical to her religious upbringing.

At age 7, "I was baptized and they used that for the baptizing ceremony," she told a judge.

Manneh is already serving a two-year sentence in state prison for trying to run over a woman she suspected of sleeping with her husband, Zanger Jefferson. If convicted of the federal charges she faces up to five more years in prison and deportation.

"The government's taking a woman away from her children," complained Jefferson, who's struggling to raise the children alone. "It's very depressing, especially with the holidays right around the corner."

The prosecution also has dampened spirits at the church in Staten Island where Manneh and other African immigrants once packed the pews to practice a religion blending Christianity and tribal customs.

One of the few worshippers left, Leona Artis, says the congregation's appetite for monkey meat is deeply misunderstood.

Take Thanksgiving.

"Where some people have turkey, we'll have monkey meat," Artis said. "I've been eating it all my life. It's delicious."

Baptisms, Easter, Christmas, weddings — all are occasions for eating monkey, Manneh's supporters said in a sworn statement filed with the court.

The statement was vague about how the meat is obtained, but explains that it always arrives dried and smoked. Once blessed by a pastor, "we usually prepare it by cooking it for several hours into a stew," they said.

For them, the exotic import is more than just food.

"We eat bushmeat," they said, "for our souls."

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