Lawyer Felix Olivares, the criminal defense lawyer for several of the defendants in the Renove scandal case, as well as for accused drug trafficker Quirino Paulino Castillo, told reporters that his client, Sam Goodson, did not flee the country as reported yesterday. Olivares told El Caribe journalists that Goodson was just taking precautions and is not in contempt. The mouthpiece said that to Goodson, it “was incomprehensible that after appearing on three occasions before the bench, that the justice department would seek to have him held in preventive custody.
Meanwhile the furor caused by Goodson’s departure continues. Attorney General Francisco Dominguez Brito told reporters that the State’s security forces are after the US citizen, and the head of the Department for the Prevention of Corruption, Octavio Lister called for the Justice Department to review the coercive measures placed against Goodson and for them to be changed to preventive custody.
The famous “Que se dice” (What’s being said) column in Hoy, also talks about the case. The columnist says that only an extremely naive person would think that Sam Goodson didn’t have a Plan B in case things didn’t turn out so good in the courtroom. This was the thinking of Octavio Lister, who revealed that Goodson had checked out of his room the day of his court appearance, when judge Alfredo Rios Fabian decided to send the case to the Criminal Division.
The existence of a Plan B was proven when the disguise and the quiet trip to the Dominican-Haitian frontier became evident. Goodson was the one with the greatest motive to get out of the country, and the author asks who is to blame for the escape. In another paragraph, the columnist said that the escape was already announced. When the judge was reading the long, boring decision to send each of the 14 accused to the criminal courts, Goodson and his lawyer left the room, and many of the reporters and photographers there already had the “idea” that Goodson would go on the lam. In the case, this is what most of the reporters were talking and joking about as he left the courtroom during the most boring part of the case, and only Franklin Guerrero, from Hoy, took a picture of the two (Olivares and Goodson) as they left. Guerrero bet his fellow journalists that nobody would stop them and it turned out to be true.