UNDATED, May 30: A United Nations group has called for the immediate release of a US citizen serving a 22-year prison sentence in Nicaragua for drug trafficking and money laundering, concluding that he was wrongly convicted, his supporters announced today.
Jason Puracal, 34, was detained by Nicaraguan authorities in November 2010 and found guilty by a trial judge nine months later along with 10 co-defendants, all of them Nicaraguan nationals.
Those co-defendants testified that they had never met or worked with Puracal, and the prosecution’s own witnesses said he was innocent, according to his legal team.
Puracal’s supporters say he came under suspicion due to
His job as a real estate agent, which gave him control over large sums of money held in escrow for property transactions and drew the attention of Nicaraguan law enforcement authorities.
In a May 24 opinion provided to Reuters by his legal team, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found that Puracal was arbitrarily imprisoned and recommended that he immediately be freed. The report, furnished confidentially to the Nicaraguan government earlier this month, was to be released publicly by Puracal’s supporters later on Wednesday.
Puracal has become a cause celebre for human rights activists in the United States and around the world, with US lawmakers appealing to Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and a former high-ranking U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration official launching a massive petition drive on Puracal’s behalf.
“There are thousands of American citizens who are detained around the world, and currently Jason Puracal is the only one who has the United Nations calling for him to be released,” Eric Volz, founder of an international advocacy organization called the David House Agency, told Reuters.
Volz, whose agency has assisted family members in seeking Puracal’s release, was himself convicted of murder in the same Nicaraguan courtroom in 2006, eventually serving 14 months of a 30-year sentence in the same prison, La Modela prison in Tipitapa, just east of the capital city, Managua.
A Nicaraguan appeals court overturned his conviction in December 2011, and Volz began advocating for those in similar situations. He has worked on behalf of Amanda Knox, the Seattle exchange student accused of murder in Italy, and the American hikers jailed in Iran after allegedly straying over the Iraq-Iran border.
(agencies)
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