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Haiti: Will Duvalier escape justice?
The second prosecutor, Sonel Jean-Francois, was removed for abusing his authority.
The third, Felix Leger, was fired after only two months for his role in ordering the overnight detention of a legislator openly critical of Martelly. Reached by cellphone while in Baltimore, Leger declined to answer questions, saying that “the ordinance the judge gave out was not up to me. It was up to the judge.”
His successor, Lionel Constant Bourgoin, didn’t last much longer — only 26 days because he refused to arrest members of an electoral council who had nearly cost Martelly his presidential victory.
The end product of the flawed process was the controversial indictment.
Sent by Jean to the fifth chief prosecutor, the order is filled with typographical and factual errors. It erroneously lists the defendant’s age as 59 even though the record notes he was born on July 3, 1951, putting his age at 60. Duvalier’s mother, Simone Ovide, is listed as a co-defendant although she died in 1971. Another co-defendant, the family decorator, Jean Sambour, is also dead.
I think the judge was too lazy to check if the people listed in the indictment were alive,” Montas said by telephone from New York. “It was very sloppy work.”
The other defendants include Duvalier’s ex-wife, Michele Bennett, personal assistant Auguste Douyon and Jean-Robert Estime, who now runs a five-year, US$126 million agricultural project called WINNER that’s financed by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Estime, the son of former Haitian President Dumarsais Estime and Duvalier’s foreign affairs minister, declined to comment on his role in the case when reached by phone Friday morning.
The judge told The Associated Press that Duvalier was the lone defendant in the current case and that a court had cleared Estime of the charges. And then, he declined to answer more questions.
“I’m totally finished,” Jean said as he escorted a reporter out of the office. “I’m not saying anything else.”
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.
