TEGUCIGALPA_ The defense of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández requested in the United States to annul the trial in which he was convicted of drug trafficking, his wife, Ana García, reported this Saturday.
On March 8, Hernández, who governed Honduras between 2014 and 2022, was found guilty of drug trafficking and arms trafficking by a jury in the Southern District Court of New York and risks spending the rest of his life in prison. The sentence will be handed down on June 26, according to the prosecutor’s office.
The lawyer “Renato Stabile representing Juan Orlando Hernández requested a new trial” invoking US federal regulations, García said in a statement released in Honduras.
The request was presented on Friday by Stabile before the same court that convicted the former president.
Annulment of the trial in the US
One of the arguments to request an annulment of the trial is that an analyst from the US anti-drug agency DEA allegedly “misled the jury by testifying that cocaine trafficking through Honduras increased during the presidency” of Hernández.
“The prosecution knew or should have been aware of this false testimony before the conclusion of the trial and did not correct it, so the conviction must be annulled,” said García, who recently announced that she will seek to be a presidential candidate in the 2025 Honduran elections. .
He stated that “the volume of cocaine that passed through Honduras to the United States decreased 40% since 2014” and also the number of planes suspected of transporting drugs “decreased approximately 30%, to 35 in total” in 2016 compared to 2015.
In addition, he argued that the trial against JOH – as Hernández is known by his initials – should have taken place in the “Southern District of Florida, which was the district to which he was taken for the first time (when the plane made a stopover en route his to New York) upon being extradited from Honduras”.
Hernández was extradited on April 21, 2022, after being detained weeks after handing over power to the current president, Xiomara Castro.
The prosecution maintained in the trial that the network that JOH protected from the presidency would have sent more than 500 tons of cocaine to the United States and in exchange Hernández would have received millions of dollars from the drug cartels.
On March 18, the Honduran prosecutor’s office asked the court to confiscate 131 assets “of illicit origin” from Hernández, his wife and other family members. There are 32 properties, 19 companies and 80 financial products (bank accounts or deposits) on which there has been a precautionary embargo since 2022.
Source: AFP
