In US, a federal judge has continued by five months the retrial of Beatrice Munyenyezi, citing the 11 Rwandan witnesses prosecutors recently produced to testify against the Manchester woman on charges she lied to immigration officials about her role in the 1994 genocide.
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.
While the government may call some of the witnesses who testified during Munyenyezi’s first trial in U.S. District Court in Concord earlier this year, it likely won’t call most, McAuliffe said.
Given the number of possible new witnesses, defense attorneys Mark
Howard and David Ruoff “reasonably think it critical that they investigate the new witnesses’ backgrounds, potential biases, possible cultural and political influences;
Also whether the witnesses have made statements in the past that might be inconsistent with the testimony they propose to offer in this court,” McAuliffe said in an order last week continuing the trial until February.
“That takes time, effort, and money,” McAuliffe’s order continued, “but counsel have little choice given the government’s determination to present what is essentially a new cast during the retrial.”
McAuliffe declared a mistrial in the case in March after jurors failed to decide whether Munyenyezi, a Rwandan native who came 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 Rwandan 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.
But family members of Munyenyezi said she took no part in the violence, and Howard and Ruoff argued the witnesses against her had been influenced to lie by the Rwandan government.
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.”
He also noted that a number of government witnesses during the first trial “were effectively impeached based upon extensive investigative and preparatory efforts by defense counsel.”
Last week, Howard said he and Ruoff had yet to receive signed releases from the new witnesses regarding any testimony they may have given in other genocide cases.
While the witnesses don’t appear to have testified in the trial of Munyenyezi’s husband, who was convicted of genocide by an international tribunal, their testimony elsewhere needs to be reviewed to determine their truthfulness, Howard said.
Howard said prosecutors also haven’t given the defense documentation of their investigation this summer in Rwanda.
“The federal agent is supposed to produce a report of his activities, and we haven’t seen anything like that,” Howard said. He said he and Ruoff may ask the court to address that issue.
Concord Monitor
