US Judge delays Genocide trial for five months

A US federal judge has continued by five months the retrial of Beatrice Munyenyezi, citing the 11 Rwandan witnesses prosecutors recently produced to testify against her on charges she lied to immigration officials about her role in the 1994 genocide. Munyenyezi is the wife of Arsene Shalom Ntahobali, who, together with his mother, were convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda sitting in Arusha, Tanzania, and sentenced to life in prison, In postponing the trial, which had been scheduled to start next week, Judge Steven McAuliffe said Munyenyezi’s attorneys were reasonable to request time to prepare for the new witnesses, whom prosecutors identified after traveling to Rwanda this summer.McAuliffe declared a mistrial in the case in March after jurors failed to decide whether Munyenyezi, who went to the United States as a refugee in 1998 and became a citizen in 2003, was guilty of naturalization fraud for denying any involvement in her home country’s genocide. Numerous witnesses testified to seeing Munyenyezi order the rapes and killings of Tutsis at a roadblock outside the hotel run by her husband’s family in Butare. The new witnesses against Munyenyezi may present different and specific claims, including that she took part in killings at the roadblock and kept a notebook with the names of the people she ordered killed, according to Howard and Ruoff. The attorneys, who said the government notified them of the new witnesses at the end of July, asked McAuliffe to delay the trial by at least six months, arguing that they needed time to investigate the witnesses and how prosecutors, who opened an investigation into Munyenyezi four years ago, were able to identify them within months of the mistrial.Assistant U.S. attorneys John Capin and Aloke Chakravarty argued a continuance that long was unnecessary and also accused Howard and Ruoff of mischaracterizing the government’s investigation, saying they found the witnesses by interviewing Rwandans and other sources familiar with genocide events in Butare.Asked last week about their response to McAuliffe’s decision, Chakravarty said prosecutors “think there’s a public interest in having an efficient conclusion to the case.”“But we also want to make sure justice is done,” he said.Capin and Chakravarty have not commented on how they might reshape their case with the new witnesses, apart from saying the charges against Munyenyezi haven’t changed.But Chakravarty acknowledged last week that he and Capin plan to address translation issues differently in light of the first trial. A juror told the Associated Press after the mistrial that doubts over the accuracy of translations contributed to the panel’s deadlock.“We’re obviously intending to present a case that’s much more sensitive to the perception and the translation issues, among other issues,” Chakravarty said.Whatever changes prosecutors make, “the evidence of the defendant’s guilt hasn’t changed,” Chakravarty said.Munyenyezi, who was held without bail after her arrest in 2010, was released on house arrest after the mistrial. That likely won’t change as a result of the new trial date, Chakravarty said.In his order continuing the trial, McAuliffe said preparation in the case had been “unusually difficult for both the government and the defense due to difficulties associated with traveling to Rwanda, diplomatic issues, cultural differences, language barriers, and complexities associated with arranging Rwandan witness travel to this country.”

National

US Judge delays Genocide trial for five months