Question: Does credit for time served apply when a person has been in custody awaiting extradition? And what types of Colombian evidence can be used in federal court? Can letters from alleged members of drug-trafficking organizations, addressed to the federal court, assuring that they did not know a particular defendant be submitted as evidence?
Answer: All time served in foreign custody, like Combita in Colombia, solely for purposes of extradition will be credited, by law, towards the defendant’s sentence in the United States. That is not a matter of discretion. It is the law. However, there are exceptions. For example, if the defendant is incarcerated in a foreign country on local charges, the time spent in custody can be credited to the local charge.
To make sure you get credit for time served, your lawyer should ask the prosecutor to place the amount of time spent incarcerated abroad on the record, noting that the time was solely for extradition purposes. Otherwise, time will be wasted trying to obtain official confirmation from the prison. The process of getting an official confirmation is as follows: First the Bureau of Prisons contacts the U.S. State Department. Then the U.S. State Department has to contact the foreign country’s State Department, which then contacts their prison. The prison sends its confirmation back to the local state department, which sends it to the U.S. State Department, which sends it to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The process will take months and problems along the way are almost a certainty.
Different types of evidence require varying degrees of authentication. The U.S. courts are much more informal than in Latin American countries. In Latin America, government offices are in love with their stamps. They never came across a document that they did not want to stamp. However, in the United States the degree of authentication will depend on what the material is to be used for. Letters in support of the defendant do not have to be authenticated. But a record showing that a defendant was not at the scene of a crime, like a passport entry for example, would have to be authenticated.
Co-defendant affidavits are worthless. If there has truly been a miscarriage of justice, retain an American lawyer that can represent the defendant and bring important information to the personal attention of the prosecutor. Usually, though, problems are cleared up once the defendant and his cohorts are brought to the United States and debriefed.
There are plenty of cases in the U.S., where co-defendants write affidavits before being extradited. When they are brought to the United States, they cooperate with the government and tell the prosecutors that they only signed the affidavits because they were forced to or threatened or that they were afraid of what would happen if they did not sign them. The government accepts their explanations and disregards the affidavits.
Investigators follow leads, study facts and build a case. They find necessary proof that they believe is sufficient to convict a defendant. The decision to dismiss a case is not going to depend on the testimony of a co-defendant. It is going to depend on the agents who investigated the case.