Venezuela Prosecutor Says Falsehoods Used to Convict Leopoldo Lopez Latin American Herald Tribune October 24, 2015
CARACAS – Franklin Nieves, one of the Venezuelan prosecutors in the trial that sent Leopoldo Lopez to jail, said in a video aired on a local media outlet that he fled the country because the Venezuelan government had pressured him into bringing “false” accusations against the opposition leader.
“I decided to leave Venezuela with my family because of the pressure applied by the executive branch and my hierarchical superiors to make me continue defending the false evidence used to convict Leopoldo Lopez,” the prosecutor said on a video aired by the Venezuelan news Web site La Patilla.
According to the prosecutor, the order to “keep defending the false evidence” against Lopez “was needed to quash an appeal and to protect the sentence handed down by the judge hearing the case.”
Lopez was sentenced to 13 years, 9 months, 7 days and 12 hours for his alleged responsibility for the violence unleashed during an anti-government protest march in early February 2014, following a trial that lasted more than a year.
In the video, Nieves urges judges and fellow prosecutors to “tell the truth” despite the pressure exerted on them by their superiors, who threaten “to fire us, send us to jail, and always trot out that series of absurd arguments as threats to make us carry out their whims.”
“My friends the judges, my fellow prosecutors, I invite you to join me in doing the right thing and tell the truth without fear. Be brave, raise your voices and show your discontent for the pressure our superiors put on us to threaten us,” he said in the almost 4-minute recording.
Nieves, who said that in the next few days he will tell “the whole truth about what transpired” during Lopez’s trial, added that anything that might happen to him or his family will be the work of the Nicolas Maduro government and of his own immediate superiors.
For his part, Lopez’s defense attorney Juan Carlos Gutierrez said soon after the video went public that Nieves’ statement constitutes evidence of the “illegality of the conviction.”
“Franklin Nieves prosecutor in the case @leopoldolopez shows once more the illegality of his conviction, the result of Procedural Fraud,” the attorney said on his Twitter account.
“The case against @leopoldolopez is corrupted and absolutely invalid. The sentence must be revoked and he must be freed immediately,” Gutierrez said in another tweet.
Following the revelations of one of the prosecutors that helped convict Leopoldo Lopez, the opposition leader’s family and friends, attorneys and members of the Venezuelan opposition expressed their hopes that he will soon be released from prison after spending 20 months behind bars.
“The sun of freedom will shine again in Venezuela,” the MUD opposition alliance posted on Twitter, while Lopez’s wife, Lilian Tintori, said on the same social network that “in 3 days FREEDOM will be closer.”
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