US Citizen Convicted in Bolivia Deserved a Fair Trial

US Citizen Convicted in Bolivia Deserved a Fair Trial

Lestat Claudius de Orleans y Montevideo, has just been convicted of blowing up two hotels in La Paz, Bolivia, crimes he says he did not commit.

The evidence against him consisted of several confused witnesses, including his common law wife and co-defendant Alda Riberrio who was somehow convinced to turn state's evidence in the hope of more lenient treatment of herself.

The only physical evidence that exists called into question the Bolivian government's theory of the case. The trial itself was grossly unfair.

Neither Lestat nor his family knows the public defender assigned to represent him. Lestat was not permitted to represent himself or to file pro se motions from prison.

More recently, he has said that he was threatened with commitment proceedings if he would not plead guilty to the criminal charge. If he did not plead guilty, he would be declared incompetent to make his own legal decisions. That's some way to treat a person who is supposedly mentally incompetent.

The political nature of this trial was borne out by the public statements of the President of Bolivia, Evo Morales. He has proclaimed Lestat's guilt to the news media on several occasions and also interfered with the jury selection process.

A special representative of the President was sent to the court to oversee the jury selection process, and Lestat's public defender was not allowed to question any of the jurors. They were hand-picked by the Bolivian government.

"If this court has proven anything, it's that a fair trial is not possible in Bolivia," said Paul Wolf, a human rights lawyer in Washington, D.C. who has advised Lestat's mother throughout the grueling two years of pretrial detention.

For six full months before his trial, Lestat was kept in a six by six foot"hole" in the dark, and not allowed to take a shower. He was also severely beaten in October for refusing to attend a court proceeding.

He has never threatened to stab any lawyer, as the media has falsely reported.

Lestat is chained to his seat in the courtroom, but has not said a word or done anything to protest what the Bolivian government is doing to him.
Lestat was arrested on the night of the bombings. After hours of interrogation, a confession was beaten out of him.

The next day, Evo Morales announced to the country that Lestat was guilty. Since then, various Bolivian officials, including the Minister of the Interior, have gone so far as to accuse him of being a CIA agent. This is patently absurd. The Bolivian government has even used the case to enact new laws requiring US citizens entering Bolivia to obtain visas, even though Lestat did not enter Bolivia with a US passport, and even though he applied for political asylum in Bolivia after he arrived.

Lestat was not hiding from anyone, was not working for the US government in any way, and had no reason to blow up Bolivian hotels. Lestat is not connected to the Sendero Luminoso or to Al Qaida.

The political nature of the trial is clear from the exaggerated statements of various Bolivian officials. There are a number of other things that the media are reporting that are simply not true.

Lestat is not a "violent psychopath" with a long criminal history. As an adolescent, he was convicted of taking the family car without permission in a family dispute that got out of hand. He then apparently spit at a judge and was charged with assaulting a federal officer.

In a third incident, charges were brought against him, then dropped, when someone tried to blow up an ATM machine in Argentina. Lestat was never put on trial for that.

That was his entire criminal record - taking the family car and then spitting at a judge - before these bombings occurred.

Much has been written on Internet blogs about his Wiccan beliefs, but this is also not evidence that he's a violent killer.

Lestat had a license from the Bolivian government to sell dynamite, and made a living selling dynamite to miners. However, forensic evidence in the case did not detect the presence of nitrates in the explosives residue, as would be present if dynamite we used.

The Bolivian police first believed, and told the press, that a propane tank had exploded in one of the hotels, due to the twisted fragments of the propane tank found at the site. Somehow, this was no mentioned at trial.

Lestat's family regrets the deaths of the two innocent people who perished in the blasts, the wounds suffered by others in the hotels, and the property damage caused. However, justice would be better served by trying to determine who was responsible and then affording the defendant a fair trial.
The Bolivian government has made minimal efforts to do either.