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Key witness against González was paid
by Eric Jackson, largely from other media

Since Pedro Miguel González's acquittal in a 1997 Panamanian trial for the drive-by shooting murder of US Army Sergeant Zak Hernandez, Washington has refused to accept the verdict and pointed to various real and alleged defects in that proceeding. Now González is a legislator, and not just any deputy but the president of the National Assembly and that along with an outstanding US terrorism warrant for him has been cited as the reason for the US Congress refusing to consider ratification of a US-Panama free trade agreement.

Now, however, a systemic scandal in the American legal system has shown its face in this dispute, and, though it may not affect what happens in Washington it is likely to have legal repercussions here. According to reports in La Estrella, which were confirmed by the US Embassy, the one purported eyewitness who fingered González and co-defendants Roberto Garrido and Daniel Batista as the killers, one Francisco De Gracia Vigil, was paid $125,000 by the US government.

That's in the spectrum from old news to not news, according to the embassy. Back in 1994 the embassy published reward notices for the 1992 shooting, and De Gracia merely picked up the reward for his information. In fact the payment of prosecution witnesses, usually made in the form of lenient treatment for the witnesses' own crimes, is an ordinary part of the US legal system. But cash payments, residency visas for witnesses and their families and other enticements are also often given to prosecution witnesses, and in both civil and criminal trials both sides typically buy the testimony of expert witnesses. On its face the Federal Bribery Statute criminalizes the offer or payment of anything of value in exchange for trial testimony, but in most US judicial circuits challenges to the practice of paying prosecution witnesses have been rejected and the US Supreme Court has never ruled on the matter. It is, however, considered proper for defense lawyers to raise the issue of bribery to impeach prosecution witnesses and it's considered an unethical practice and quite frequently reversible error when the prosecution conceals from the defense information about payments made or promised to witnesses.

The payoff to De Gracia didn't take place until after the trial, and the witness said that he hadn't been paid. The promise of the payoff was apparently never revealed to the defense either.

Now González and the attorney who defended him, Carlos Carrillo, are demanding a criminal investigation of De Gracia for bribery and perjury. Panamanian justice may be systematically corrupt, but here payoffs to prosecution witnesses, especially undisclosed ones, are illegal.

At the trial De Gracia testified that he saw the defendants drive by and shoot into the US Army Humvee in which Hernandez and other soldiers were riding, killing Hernandez and wounding one Ronald Marshall. The shooting took place in Chilibre, near the turnoff from the Transistmica that leads to the Madden Dam. But against this other alibi witnesses for the defense said that González was participating in a political event miles away at the University of Panama.

The key piece of physical evidence, a Kalashnikov assault rifle unearthed on a farm belonging to González's sister, was "positively" identified by the FBI Crime Lab as the murder weapon, but the Panamanian PTJ lab ruled it out as such and the forensic ballistics experts at Britain's Scotland Yard testified that the rifle couldn't be conclusively be shown to have been the weapon used in the attack or to be ruled out as such.

The jury --- all of them government workers who faced the implicit prospect of losing their jobs if they handed down a "wrong" verdict --- voted to acquit and Washington cried foul. As in racially charged state trials in which all-white juries acquit white police officers of crimes against black people where the federal government is not bound by those verdicts in seeking convictions for civil rights violations, in the González case the US Department of Justice takes the stand that his acquittal here has no bearing on federal terrorism charges arising from the same incident there.

However, the payoff to De Gracia that went undisclosed at the trial is likely to be both a legal and political issue here and surely González is hoping to gain political traction with it in the United States. In the event that US authorities are ever able to lay hands on the legislator, he would face a possible death penalty if brought to trial in the USA.

According to some leading congressional Democrats, without González at the head of the assembly the US-Panama Trade Promotion Agreement will easily pass, but others say that when he steps down from that post on September 1 the United States will be into an election campaign and the matter would not be taken up until the new Congress to be elected in November is seated in January of 2009. However, there may well be a ratification push in a lame duck session after the voting.