After years of lobbying by Mexican diplomats, Sultan Ibrahim Sultan Iskandar of Johor — one of Malaysia’s most powerful and wealthiest state rulers — commuted the men’s death sentences to life in prison, Mexico’s foreign ministry said Thursday.
“This was the result of a long process and intense dialogue with Malaysian federal authorities,” it said in a statement.
The brothers, who hail from the Mexican state of Sinaloa — home to jailed drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel — insisted they were innocent, saying they had been hired to clean the building and were unaware what was being made inside.
But a Malaysian court sentenced them to hang to death in May 2012.
The conviction was upheld on appeal the following year.
Mexico, which does not use capital punishment, neither accepted nor rejected the court’s guilty verdict, but pushed for the death sentence to be commuted.
Source: Agence France-Presse, January 22, 2019
⚑ | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us:
deathpenaltynews@gmail.com.
Opposed to Capital Punishment? Help us keep this blog up and running! DONATE!
"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde