Mexican Drug Kingpin Joaquin Guzman a.k.a. El Chapo to face U.S. Court on April 16, 2018

May 7th, 2017

Awake Goy

nsnbc : A U.S. judge has scheduled the pending trial against Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin Guzman a.k.a. El Chapo for April 16, 2018. Having ranked among the most wanted for years, Guzman will have to spend the time until April next year behind bars.

Photo courtesy Edgard Garrido / Reuters

U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan in Brooklyn federal Court, during a hearing on Friday, noted that the set date in April next year was somewhat aspirational and could be delayed. Judge Cogan cited the complexity of the case and the amount of evidence that lawyers have to review ahead of trial as reasons fro possible delays.

In a hearing on Friday Cogan refused to order Guzman released from solitary confinement in a new York City federal prison. Guzman’s court-appointed lawyers stressed that their client faces needlessly harsh and restrictive conditions that make it difficult for him to mount his defense.

Extensive use of long-term solitary confinement is, despite evidence about its adverse impact on physical and mental health as well as a defendant’s ability to concentrate and focus on complex trial issues commonplace in the U.S.A., Denmark, and other western countries that generally promote themselves a beacons of democracy and human rights.

However, Judge Cogan ruled that Guzman could at least send pre-screened letters to his wife Emma Coronel who was present during Friday’s hearing. He request to be allowed to visit her husband was denied.

Michelle Gelernt, one of Guzman’s lawyers, again brought up the conditions of Guzman’s imprisonment at Friday’s hearing, saying it was difficult to review evidence because lawyers were only allowed to speak to Guzman through a plexi-glass barrier.

Cogan said he would send a magistrate judge to look at the room where Guzman meets with his lawyers and make recommendations about how the problem could be overcome, though he said he did not want to “micro-manage” the prison. Not allowing contact between a pre-trial detainee and legal counsel is also highly unusual and questionable.

Guzman also said at the hearing, through an interpreter, that he understood that four of the witnesses expected to testify against him had previously been represented by the same federal public defender’s office that represents him, though not by the same attorneys, raising the possibility of conflicts of interest. He said, however, that he wished to keep his attorneys nonetheless.

All four of those witnesses, whose names have not been disclosed, are currently serving prison sentences in the U.S. said Judge Cogan. Guzman, who sold oranges as a child before turning to the drug trade in the 1970s. He escaped from jail in late 2015 but was rearrested soon after his spectacular escape through a tunnel. He was extradited from Mexico to the United States to face drug trafficking charges on January 19, 2017

Guzman a.k.a. El Chapo has previously escaped from two Mexican prisons. In his most recent escape in 2015, Guzman walked out of prison through a mile-long, highly engineered tunnel from his cell.

F/AK – nsnbc 06.05.2017