Mexico's justice department is expressing doubts as to the legitimacy of a court's ruling on the case of Rafael Caro Quintero, a former leader of the Guadalajara drug cartel who walked free last week after serving 28 years of a 40-year sentence for the kidnapping and murder of US Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena. A state court had overturned Caro Quintero's conviction on the grounds that the kingpin was improperly tried in a state court instead of the federal court which handed out his sentence. Mexico's attorney general, Jesús Murillo Karam, says he's concerned by the decision.
In a statement, Murillo Karam said that the state court had disregarded the Mexican Supreme Court, which held that Caro Quintero should see his case referred to a higher court instead of being released.
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"The Attorney General maintains that the First Collegiate Tribunal completely ignored the recent opinion maintained just this past March by the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation in ruling that an authority which the latter had considered an incompetent jurisdiction must discontinue the charges sought against Caro Quintero, freeing him, when in accordance with the Court's criteria, it should have referred the case to a judge deemed competent", he wrote, adding that "in the way in which it occurred, it produces an absolution without judgment by a judge with the same Tribunal considered incompetent."
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The Jalisco state court had ruled that Caro Quintana should not have been tried in federal court because of a legal requisite that the murder victim be a consular or diplomatic agent. As agents with U.S. law enforcement, Camarena and the other murder victim -- his pilot Alfredo Zavala -- didn't qualify.
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According to El Universal, Murillo Karam said at a conference at El Colegio de Mexico that the case of Caro Quintero was a kind of impunity, adding that although the drug lord had served 28 years of his sentence, he should have remained in jail for at least 40 of those to which he was sentenced in the case. The attorney general also said he didn't understand through what legal mechanism the state court had set Caro Quintana free.
"I especially don't understand how the overruling is produced twenty-some years later on the incompetence of a judge to rule or not on a prisoner. It worries me because many other prisoners are in the same very delicate situation."
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