ONLY HIS 6-YEAR OLD TWIN DAUGHTERS HAVE BEEN ALLOWED TO VISIT EL CHAPO

El Chapo’s attorney, who is not allowed any face-to-face visits with his client, files for a continuance needing additional time for trial prep

by Chivis Martinez

Borderland Beat
December 28, 2017

El Chapo shared a Christmas visit with his twin six year old twin daughters. His daughters were born in California in 2011, thereby are American citizens, as is their mother Emma Coronel Aispuro. The visit marks the fourth time Chapo has been allowed to see his twins.

Despite erroneous reports in the news, Emma did not visit Chapo on the 23rd with the twins, and has never been allowed a visit with her husband since extradited.

The Daily Mail, (U.K.Publication) ran the story of Emma visiting Chapo, and several media outlets republished their story. DM tells Borderland Beat, the story originated from Washington Post and they took the information from that story.
The judge presiding in Chapo’s case had placed severe restrictions on visits. Virtually none, except the twins and even his attorney Eduardo Balarezo has no contact and no private visits with his client.

On Christmas Eve Chapo’s attorney filed a request for continuance.
The filing stresses the encumbrance of reviewing discovery and the mountain of discovery, several hundreds of thousands pages, and hundreds of thousands of recordings. With the replacement of his defense with Balarezo, in effect the defense began preparation for trial on September 3rd of this year.

The reviewing of discovery would be a monumental task in the best of situations, however reviewing prosecution discovery, has been impeded by the restrictions of the legal team’s court ordered no contact visits. Add in the fact that Chapo’s reading skills and computer skills are very low.

Description below:

The room is approximately five feet by ten feet, divided in half by a cement wall and a mesh/Plexiglas window. On the attorney side of the room there is cement block measuring approximately two feet by two feet containing a metal drawer that slides into the inmate side of the visiting room. The drawer is meant to facilitate the passing of documents back and forth and was installed because the Court rejected contact visits with Mr. Guzmán.

The government/MCC also set up a computer screen on the attorney side for Mr. Guzmán to connect his government issued laptop to the monitor so as to allow both sides to view discovery on that one monitor. The monitor is approximately 15 inches across and of low resolution, making it almost impossible for Mr. Guzmán to view anything displayed on it from his side of the visiting room. As the defense pointed out to the government/MCC, this setup allowed Mr. Guzmán to control the reviewing of discovery, and since he is not facile with computers, the process of reviewing any one document took an unreasonable period of time.

The defense is asking for a continuance until August or September 2018.