Ousted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro recently returned to a US court on criminal charges including narcoterrorism, a statute that has rarely been tested at trial and has a limited record of success. The 2006 statute at issue, enacted to target drug trafficking tied to activities the United States considers terrorism, has produced just four trial convictions.
“The lesson of these two cases is not that the narcoterrorism statute is unworkable,” Bracewell’s Alamdar Hamdani told Reuters.
“It is that the statute’s most demanding element – proving the defendant’s knowledge of the terrorism nexus – requires a quality of evidence and a standard of prosecutorial diligence that leaves no room for institutional gaps, name-spelling errors or uncritical acceptance of what your witnesses tell you,” Hamdani said.
