Posted on 05/10/2007 8:40:09 AM PDT by Rb ver. 2.0
RALEIGH (AP) — A Mexican native jailed on a drug charge was offered a plea deal because a Raleigh-based federal drug agent made him wear a sombrero and hold a Mexican flag for a photo.
Jorge Hernandez-Villalvazo, a native of Mexico with a permanent U-S residency, was arrested in April 2005 on a charge of conspiring to traffic cocaine. The photo from that year shows him wearing a sombrero and holding the flag.
When it surfaced during a pretrial hearing last week, prosecutors offered a plea deal that avoided a trial and freed Hernandez-Villalvazo from the Wake County Jail, where he had been since his arrest. Hernandez-Villalvazo was sentenced to 13 months to 16 months in jail — time he already served.
Defense attorney Jeff Cutler called the photo “the driving force behind that plea deal.”
“They humiliated him,” Cutler said.
Wake District Attorney Colon Willoughby called taking the photo a mistake that shouldn’t have happened.
Hernandez-Villalvazo entered an Alford plea, which allows him to acknowledge the evidence could result in a conviction but doesn’t require him to acknowledge guilt.
Cutler said Hernandez-Villalvazo told him about the photo shortly after he was arrested, but the attorney said he was dubious. He recently asked investigators about the claim.
Under North Carolina’s open discovery law, which is intended to allow defense attorneys to see all evidence, the photo should have been shared long before last week’s hearing, said Thomas Maher, director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, a nonprofit law firm in Durham.
Willoughby said the lead prosecutor in the case didn’t know about the photograph until last week, and that it was taken by a Drug Enforcement Administration agent assisting in Hernandez-Villalvazo’s arrest, not by the primary DEA investigator.
The DEA would not identify the agent or make the photo public. An agency spokeswoman in Atlanta said officials are looking into the incident.
The investigation, which involved the Wake County Sheriff’s Office and relied on court-ordered wiretaps of several phone lines, resulted in seven arrests.
No cocaine was ever seized from Hernandez-Villalvazo, who at the time of his arrest lived in the Zebulon area, east of Raleigh, where he bought cars and took them to Mexico to sell, Cutler said. Hernandez-Villalvazo had rejected a previous plea deal for a three- to four-year prison sentence because he was innocent, his attorney said.
Court documents show that two other people arrested in the case have pleaded guilty and are willing to testify, while three suspects remain in the Wake County Jail awaiting trials. Another suspect was released and is awaiting trial, though his attorney believes he returned to Mexico.
Cutler said Hernandez-Villalvazo, who declined to comment, also plans to return to Mexico.
He should feel lucky they did’nt stick the flag somewhere else for his picture....
Natchally, bro.
Can you do the laugh?
The Left considers the “humilation” of any person who isn’t a white, straight, conservative male to be the worst imaginable offense. .....far worse than drug running, that’s for sure.
I could then. Not much to laugh about these days.
Sorry to hear that.
...sombreros....???
We ain’t got no sombreros....
We don’t need no STINKIN’ beaner hats....!!!
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