On this Jan. 8, 2016 file picture, a handcuffed Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman is made to face the press as he's escorted to a helicopter by Mexican troopers and marines at a federal hangar in Mexico Metropolis. (AP Picture/Eduardo Verdugo, File)
NEW YORK --
The Mexican drug kingpin often called "El Chapo" will keep in jail after a U.S. appeals court docket refused to overturn his 2019 drug trafficking conviction regardless of a report that jurors had tracked the case within the media throughout his blockbuster trial.
A 3-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court docket of Appeals in Manhattan on Tuesday rejected 10 arguments by the defendant, whose actual identify is Joaquin Guzman, for a brand new trial, together with that deplorable jail circumstances undermined his defence.
"I am positive Mr. Guzman will search Supreme Court docket overview," Guzman's defendant's lawyer Marc Fernich stated in an e mail. "We're upset that substantial allegations of grave jury misconduct proceed to be swept beneath the rug ... all, it seems, due to the defendant's matchless notoriety."
The workplace of U.S. Lawyer Breon Peace in Brooklyn declined to remark.
Guzman, 64, was convicted in February 2019 of trafficking billions of dollars of medication and conspiring to homicide enemies, stemming from his function as a pacesetter of Mexico's Sinaloa cartel.
He has been serving a life sentence at Colorado's Supermax, probably the most safe federal jail, and was additionally ordered to forfeit US$12.7 billion.
Guzman's attraction targeted on a Vice Information article printed one week after the decision, the place an unnamed juror stated a minimum of 5 fellow jurors adopted media protection of the trial, and lied about it to the presiding choose.
The protection included accusations that Guzman had drugged and raped teenage ladies, which Guzman's legal professionals denied and U.S. District Decide Brian Cogan refused to permit into the trial.
Judges in high-profile instances ordinarily instruct jurors to not observe their trials in newspapers, TV and the web, together with social media.
Circuit Decide Jon Newman stated the unnamed juror's unsworn, uncorroborated statements to Vice Information weren't "clear, sturdy, substantial and incontrovertible proof" requiring Cogan to haul jurors again for questioning.
"Not one of the allegations within the Vice Information article exhibits that any juror was not neutral, harbored bias in opposition to Guzman, or was in any other case unfit to serve," Newman wrote.
Newman stated Cogan had additionally through the trial spoken with two jurors who noticed details about the case, and acted inside his discretion in concluding they could possibly be honest.
Guzman additionally objected to being confined after his January 2017 extradition to a small windowless cell a minimum of 23 hours a day within the since-closed Metropolitan Correctional Middle in Manhattan.
However Newman stated the jail circumstances, "harsh as they have been," didn't make the trial unfair, citing Guzman's historical past of jail escapes and managing his unlawful affairs from jail, and security issues if he lived with different inmates.
Emma Coronel Aispuro, Guzman's spouse, was sentenced in November to 3 years in jail after she admitted to serving to run his drug empire, and involvement in his July 2015 escape from a Mexican jail by way of a tunnel dug into his cell.
Guzman was recaptured in January 2016.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Modifying by Alistair Bell)
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