Former Honduras national police chief gets 19 years in US prison for cocaine distribution

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Former Honduras national police chief gets 19 years in US prison for cocaine distribution

2024-08-02 09:17 Last Updated At：09:20

NEW YORK (AP) — The former chief of the Honduran National Police was sentenced Thursday to 19 years in prison after he pleaded guilty in a conspiracy to protect shipments of cocaine destined for the United States.

Juan Carlos Bonilla Valladares, 64, better known as “El Tigre” or “The Tiger,” was a member of the Honduran National Police for decades before becoming its leader for a year in 2012.

He rose to power by enabling cocaine trafficking on a massive sale and using violence, including murder, to protect the drug trade, prosecutors said in a presentencing brief. They had asked that he be sentenced to 30 years in prison.

The sentence in Manhattan federal court was announced by Judge P. Kevin Castel.

In a brief by the defense, attorney Donald Vogelman requested a sentence of 10 years in prison. He wrote that Bonilla Valladares “was not always involved in illegal activities” and that although he admitted his guilt in a drug conspiracy, “he adamantly denies being involved in any murders.”

“From time to time he was involved in the illegal drug trade. He actually did good work in service to his country most of the time. He was a very gifted man who lived a dual life which was unfortunate,” Vogelman said.

The lawyer said his client was in poor health and “will be a marked man” if he survives incarceration and is returned to Honduras.

“He will not go back to criminal activities. That chapter in his life is behind him,” the lawyer said.

In Honduras, retired Honduran National Police commissioner Henry Osorio Canales said the sentence was the latest example of how his country's institutions were at the service of drug traffickers.

“We had a government that was in criminal hands, which steered the destiny of the people and El Tigre was its armed branch,” he said.

A son of Bonilla Valladares by the same name, Juan Carlos Bonilla, who was in the courtroom Thursday, told Honduras’ HRN radio that his father maintains his innocence and only made a guilty plea because he hopes to one day be free again.

“He told us it was all a political persecution,” the younger Bonilla said. “Today was very difficult to see my father in that situation.” He added that his father would appeal his sentence.

Prosecutors said Bonilla Valladares accepted lucrative bribes for providing armed protection as cocaine was transported across Honduras. They said he directed other corrupt law enforcement officers to protect those shipments and furnished sensitive law enforcement information about pending raids to his co-conspirators.

He was arrested March 9, 2022, after he was labeled by U.S. prosecutors as a co-conspirator of former President Juan Orlando Hernández and the president’s brother Tony Hernández. Prosecutors said prior to his sentencing that the brothers were the “powerful political allies” of Bonilla Valladares.

In June, Juan Orlando Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in prison in Manhattan federal court after he was convicted in March on drug charges after a two-week trial that was closely followed in his home country.

Tony Hernández, a former Honduran congressman, was sentenced to life in a U.S. prison in 2021 in the same courthouse for his own conviction on drug charges.

In a release, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said Valladares “committed the very crimes he was sworn to prevent.”

Anne Milgram, administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, said Bonilla Valladares exploited his position as head of the Honduran National Police to “traffic cocaine to the United States and protect drug traffickers.”

Associated Press writer Marlon González in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, contributed to this report

Karen Read's lawyers appeal to US Supreme Court ahead of retrial over death of her police boyfriend

2025-04-05 05:39 Last Updated At：05:41

Karen Read's lawyers have filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court in their bid to drop some charges against her, and 10 jurors have been chosen in her retrial, less than a year after a judge declared a mistrial on charges that she was responsible for the death of her Boston police officer boyfriend.

Jury selection began Tuesday and will continue next week. Lawyers are seeking to seat 16 jurors, with four serving as alternates.

Read, of Mansfield, is accused of striking her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe, with her SUV and leaving him to die in a snowstorm in 2022 outside a house party in the town of Canton. Her attorneys have said O’Keefe was actually killed by someone else, possibly another law enforcement agent who was at the party, and that she was framed.

Last year, the judge declared a mistrial after jurors said they were at an impasse and deliberating further would be futile.

After the trial, several jurors came forward to say the group was unanimous in finding Read not guilty of the most serious charge, second-degree murder, and a lesser charge. Despite attempts by Read’s lawyers to get those charges dismissed, she will face the same counts as she did at her first trial. They also failed to have the entire case tossed, arguing governmental misconduct.

Read, who worked as a financial analyst and Bentley College adjunct professor before she was charged, faces second-degree murder and other charges in the death of John O’Keefe, who was 46 when he died. The 16-year police veteran was found unresponsive outside the home of a fellow Boston police officer.

After a night out drinking, prosecutors say Read, who is 45, dropped off O’Keefe at the house party just after midnight. As she made a three-point turn, prosecutors say, she struck O’Keefe before driving away. She returned hours later to find him in a snowbank.

As they did at the first trial, prosecutors will try to convince jurors that Read’s actions were intentional. They are expected to call witnesses who will describe how the couple's relationship had begun to sour before O'Keefe's death. Among them will be his brother, who testified during the first trial that the couple regularly argued over such matters as what Read fed O’Keefe’s children, and that he witnessed a 2021 fight the couple had in Cape Cod over how his brother treated her. The brother's wife testified that Read told her the couple fought in Aruba after she caught O’Keefe kissing another woman.

The defense is expected to portray the investigation into O’Keefe’s death as shoddy and undermined by the close relationship investigators had with the police officers and other law enforcement agents who were at the house party.

Among the key witnesses they will call is former State Trooper Michael Proctor, who led the investigation but has since been fired after a disciplinary board found he sent sexist and crude texts about Read to his family and colleagues. He also is on the prosecution's witness list.

A key moment in the first trial was Proctor’s testimony, in which the defense suggested his texts about Read and the case showed he was biased, and had singled her out early in the investigation and ignored other potential suspects.

They also are expected to suggest Read was framed, saying O’Keefe was actually killed inside the home during a fight with another partygoer and then dragged outside. In the first trial, defense attorneys suggested investigators focused on Read because she was a “convenient outsider” who saved them from having to consider law enforcement officers as suspects.

Ahead of the second trial, the two sides sparred over whether Read's lawyers will be allowed to argue that someone else killed O'Keefe. Judge Beverly Cannone ruled Monday that attorneys can't mention potential third-party culprits in their opening statements but will be allowed to develop evidence against Brian Albert, a retired police officer who owned the Canton home, and his friend Brian Higgins. Lawyers cannot implicate Albert's nephew, Colin Albert, the judge said.

A town-commissioned Canton Police Department audit following O'Keefe's death was released Sunday. While not reinvestigating any cases, its top suggestions regarding Read's were that first responders should have photographed O'Keefe where he was found before he was moved; that all interviews of “critical witnesses” should have been done at the department after O'Keefe was taken to a hospital; and that agreed-to recordings of witness interviews be conducted.

Soon after the mistrial, Read's lawyers set out to get the main charges dropped.

They argued Judge Cannone declared a mistrial without polling the jurors to confirm their conclusions. Defense attorney Martin Weinberg said five jurors indicated after the trial that they were only deadlocked on the manslaughter count and had unanimously agreed that she wasn’t guilty of second-degree murder and leaving the scene, but that they hadn’t told the judge.

The defense said that because jurors had agreed Read wasn't guilty of murder and leaving the scene, retrying her on those counts would amount to double jeopardy. But Cannone rejected that argument, as did the state's highest court, a federal court judge, and an appeals court. Defense attorneys have since appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Prosecutors had urged Cannone to dismiss the double jeopardy claim, saying it amounted to "hearsay, conjecture and legally inappropriate reliance as to the substance of jury deliberations.” Assistant District Attorney Adam Lally argued that the jurors never indicated they had reached a verdict on any of the charges, were given clear instructions on how to reach a verdict, and that the defense had ample opportunity to object to the mistrial declaration.

The second trial will likely look similar to the first. It will be held in the same courthouse before the same judge, and dozens of Read's passionate supporters are again expected to rally outside. The charges, primary defense lawyers and many of the nearly 200 witnesses will also be the same.

The biggest difference will be the lead prosecutor, Hank Brennan. A former prosecutor and defense attorney who was brought in as a special prosecutor after the mistrial, Brennan has represented a number of prominent clients, including notorious Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger, and experts think he might be more forceful than Lally was in arguing the case.