A man was accused of petty theft and the judge dismissed the charges, but the judge’s orders were not carried out until ten years and four months had passed. The basic issue was the fact that the man is a Haitian with no official documentation and neither did he have Dominican identification papers, the well-known “cedula” that is issued to Dominican nationals or foreign residents at the age of 16.
The case was discovered and resolved by the National Public Defenders Office, that discovered the miscarriage of justice, and had the man removed from the jail in El Seibo. The Public Defenders Office said that the man, known as Gerard Luis, had been represented in court by private legal counsel, but that this lawyer abandoned the case because the poor fellow could not pay him.
The spokesperson for the Public Defenders Office, Rodolfo Valentine said that there are thousands of other similar defendants who are abandoned by their defense lawyers each year. He added that the prosecutor for the province of El Seibo, as well as the magistrate in charge of the execution of the ruling should have noted this aberration and released the man years ago.
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Diario Libre
5 August 2024