Photo: ORLANDO SIERRA / Reforma Agency
For: EFE Updated 22 Apr 2022, 10: 54 pm EDT
NEW YORK – The trial against the former president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández was scheduled today for the next 10 May at 11 in the morning by of the investigating judge of the Federal Court of the South of New York, Stewart D. Aaron.
The defendant, assisted by an interpreter, did not move to the court, but was connected by videoconference from the prison where he was sent yesterday after his extradition from Honduras, and limited himself to saying that he knew the charges for which he is being accused and that they could cost him life imprisonment.
Hernandez, of 53 years, is accused by the Department of Justice of crimes ranging from 2004 to 2022, for the following three charges: conspiracy to import cocaine, possession of machine guns and weapons s heavy and conspiracy for the possession of those machine guns and weapons. These crimes can be worth life imprisonment.
Dressed in a white shirt and a blue quilted jacket – that is, he was not wearing the prison uniform – Hernández was calm and very attentive to the explanations of his lawyer Raymond Colon, while he sipped a coke, without leaving his phone at any time.
The lawyer Aaron read him his rights -not to incriminate himself with his statements, to have a public defender or of his choice, to have consular assistance, among others-, but did not asked him in this first session of instruction if he pleads guilty or not guilty.
Lawyer Colón informed the judge that Hernández “for the moment” accepts the detention but “reserves the right to ask to be released on bail”.
Some Honduran citizens had entered the courtroom to see their former president in e l circuit television, while a noisier group of them gathered at the entrance to the courthouse shouting at him, calling him a drug trafficker and asking that he be punished with three life sentences.
It may interest you:
– The Department of Justice confirms the charges against the former president of Honduras extradited to the US for drug trafficking
– Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was extradited to the US. where they accuse him of drug trafficking
– Juan Orlando Hernández: Supreme Court of Honduras ratifies the extradition to the US of the former president