The parole granted to the only suspect in the murder of five university students in Liberia generates a war of opinion, as well as an exchange of clarifications between authorities from the Ministry of Justice and the Court of Appeal from the Judicial Branch.
Despite having a 8-year-old sentence for drug trafficking, suspect Ríos Mairena was able to use all the resources offered by the system to evade imprisonment.
His judicial record summarizes that the first benefit was obtained in less than 2 years after his sentence:
July 2011: He was in custody for drug sales.
July 24th, 2012: he was sentenced to eight years in prison for this crime.
July 9th, 2014: he received the first prison benefit from the National Institute of Criminology and went to a prison center where he could go to his house on weekends.
July 24th, 2014: the benefit was canceled due to a fight with another inmate and he returned to the CAI of Liberia.
Beginning of August 2014: he requested parole for half-sentence.
August 6th, 2014: the National Institute of Criminology (INC) recommended not granting the benefit.
December 7th, 2015: the Court of Execution of the Penalty granted the conditional release in spite of having the negative report of the INC in the file included in 2014.
December 2016: Liberia Community Service Program Office of the Ministry of Justice analyzed the benefit and gave a positive report after the departure.
February 4th, 2017: he was rrested on suspicion of killing 5 people.
The sequence of events is interpreted by some as a lack of coordination between the National Institute of Criminology (INC) and the Courts of execution.
CRHoy.com spoke with deputy minister of Justice Marco Feoli to try to clarify the doubts.
He stated that this situation leave Costa Ricans two lessons. The first thing is that spite of the legal and technical controls that exist, no penitentiary system is infallible: nobody could foresee that a sentenced by the crime of drug sale was going to become a multiple killer. The second thing is that Costa Ricans have to fight against the disinformation that leads to hatred, it gets the masses enraged and instead of facing violence with another type of approach, it is provoked.
When asked about the crime, he declared that it could have been prevented, but not because of an institution decision: he was on jail for selling drugs, no lawyer could have imagined that he would become a murderer.
According to the lawyer, it was not a crime of negligence, since his sentence was related to drugs, not to murder.
Ríos Mairena received pre-trial detention for one year.