“El Chapo” demands a new trial. Sentenced to life in New York in 2019 for his role at the head of the Sinaloa Cartel, Mexican drug trafficker Joaquin Guzman – El Chapo is his nickname – asked American justice to have his conviction overturned.
Claiming to have been “deprived of the right to the assistance of a lawyer”Mr. Guzman also claims “the holding of a new trial or the scheduling of a hearing of witnesses”according to a court document he signed on September 6 and made public by a court in mid-October.
El Chapo accuses his lawyer at the time of having been “Ineffective” in its legal assistance by not requesting a prior analysis of the documents provided by Mexico to support a US extradition request. Mexican authorities thus allowed him to be tried in Brooklyn and not in Texas or California as stipulated in the extradition request, according to Joaquin Guzman.
This omission prejudiced Mr. Guzman and prevented him from presenting an adequate case to challenge the conditions of extradition, according to the document, which alleges that El Chapo was deprived of a ” fair trial “.
A first appeal rejected
Considered at his time as the most powerful drug trafficker in the world, Joaquin Guzman was convicted in July 2019 of extensive drug trafficking between Mexico and the United States, as well as of illegal use of a firearm. and money laundering. He was sentenced to life, with a symbolic sentence of 30 additional years in prison for using automatic weapons.
Mr. Guzman had previously appealed his conviction, but his request was denied and his sentence upheld in January by the federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, New York.
El Chapo, 65, known for his spectacular escape from a Mexican prison through a tunnel in 2015, is being held in the maximum security prison in Florence, Colorado (western United States).
His wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, was sentenced at the end of November 2021 by a US federal judge to three years in prison after admitting her participation in the Sinaloa cartel trafficking. She was arrested in February 2021 at Washington airport.