Accordint to The Telegraph UK, Mexico is considering using masked judges to try organized crime suspects in an attempt to protect them from drug cartels’ brutal retribution.
The proposal was added this week to a controversial package of judicial reforms being pushed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the outgoing president.
It comes after a spate of murders of police chiefs, prosecutors and judges as the cartels’ power and reach has grown since Mr López Obrador took office in 2018.
In one case, the judge Roberto Elías Martínez was gunned down by two men as he got into his car in the crime-wracked central state of Zacatecas in December 2022.
Prosecutors subsequently alleged that the hit had been ordered from a prison where two men whose cases the judge was overseeing were being held. In Zacatecas alone, 103 judges are reported to have received threats.
The amendment to the planned overhaul of the court system calls for “judges without faces”, but would leave it up to senior judges to decide how to implement that.
A similar system was used in Peru in the 1990s to try alleged members of the Shining Path terrorist group that regularly killed police officers, magistrates and other authority figures.
Some judges were masked while others sat behind screens in court. But the system was hugely controversial and resulted in multiple miscarriages of justice requiring eventual retrials in which many defendants were acquitted.
Click here to read the complete, original article on The Telegraph UK
Source: The Telegraph
