Venezuelan appeals ‘extra years in jail’

As a result, officials at the Maximum State Prison could not discount the six years William Linares spent in jail awaiting trial for trafficking in heroin, from the eight-year jail term Justice Andre Mon Desir imposed on him in 2009.

Linares’ appeal against the sentence of Mon Desir will come up for hearing next week Monday in the Appeal Court, Hall of Justice, Port -of-Spain. Senior Counsel Sophia Chote, who filed and will argue Linares’ appeal, is contending that Linares may have already served his time and is in jail illegally.

On August 10, 2005, Linares, 37, of Caracas, and two other Venezuelans, were held at Cedros Port by Customs Officers with a suitcase. It contained 3.42 kilos of heroin. After 77 adjournments in the Magistrates’ courts, Linares was committed to stand trial on February 22, 2007. He appeared before Mon Desir in the San Fernando High Court on April 28, 2009, and pleaded guilty. The judge sentenced him to eight years in jail. The judge’s order was, “You will serve a term of eight years imprisonment with hard labour, and the time that you have already served will be taken into account.”

Linares had already spent six prison years awaiting trial. Eight months are equivalent to one prison year. In an appeal filed in the Appeal Court Registry, Hall of Justice, against the sentence imposed on Linares, Chote submitted that the wording of Mon Desir’s order was ambiguous and unworkable.

In her appeal application to the Appeal Court judges, Chote submitted, “The articulation of this order is ambiguous. How would this time spent in custody be taken into account, by whom and what would its value be. The appellant (Linares) having spent three years in custody awaiting the hearing of his appeal, has now spent seven years in custody. In prison years, he has spent ten years and five months.”

Chote intends to argue before the appellate judges, that Linares should be released from custody on June 10 because she had sought clarification from Mon Desir on the day of the sentencing, on how his order should be interpreted in the context of the time the accused should actually serve in jail upon his conviction. Chote stated in her appeal, “When clarification was sought, the court had this to say: ‘I’m not sure that I am in law, obliged to or entitled to direct the Commissioner of Prisons to do that.’”

At the June 10 appeal hearing, Chote intends to submit in accordance with her written submissions, that the period Mon Desir jailed Linares for, was not discounted from the six years he was incarcerated awaiting trial. The Senior Counsel has cited a judgment in a 2011 Caribbean Court of Justice case in which Justice Rolston Nelson, deliberated on the issue and stated, “The method by which time spent on remand is to be credited, should at all times be transparent, reasonable and just. But it should equally be practical, predictable and simple.”