For criminal justice professionals, Luis Martin Millán and Rogelio Garza, the first a former representative of the federal Attorney General's Office (PGR) in various states and the second a former legal director for the Attorney General of Nuevo Leon, and both governors during the PAN administrations of Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon, arraigo [detention of a suspect without formal charges for up to 40 days] became a means to present apparent blows against organized crime and thus obtain a positive media effect for both PAN administrations, in the face of the inability of law enforcement agencies to conduct a real investigation.
Both lawyers, interviewed separately, urged President Enrique Peña Nieto and the Congress to amend sections 16 and 20 of the Constitution, such that precautionary measures, including arraigo, searches and interception of private communications, that have had a constitutional basis since 2008, might become "measures of exception", and not as at present, when amparos [appeals for an injunction of protection] don't have success against these procedures.
The arraigo issue was put on the table by the current head of the PGR, Jesús Murillo Karam, who, in front of agency officials, said on Monday that
"we urgently need to have sufficient evidence to prove guilt and innocence with such fullness that we don't need or even use the precautionary measures such as arraigo, or some others that we must slowly discard as we grow."Murillo Karam also referred yesterday to arraigo during a radio interview, sayiing it definitely should remain as
"a truly exceptional measure, in cases of great danger and with more or less full proof of the accused's guilt."The head of the PGR said that the institution will implement
"modern systems of identification and scientific detection in a year or two, because, he said, the police and the prosecutors have to be rehabilitated.He said
"the arrraigo is indispensible while prosecutors don't have the conditions of modern, technological, scientific investigation that enable them to achieve what [current forms of] investigation now gives by other means."He explained that among the problems that exist, such that the PGR doesn't function in a better manner, lies
"the lack of systematic procedures, and that most of the time the police arrest someone, who maybe guilty or probably responsible, but without any investigation, without any collecting of evidence, without any basis, and suddenly the case is given to the prosecutor, who then has no choice but use the arraigo or drop the case."For his part, the criminal lawyer, Martin Millan said yesterday, in an interview with La Jornada, that arraigo
"has become a criminal investigation technique in Mexico. Supposedly, arraigo is used as a means to investigate suspected criminals, but in practice it allows continuous oversight by the Public Ministry [investigative police] of individuals suspected of committing a crime or having information related to it, in order to increase the time that the police have to gather evidence against the person under arrest.
The aim of arraigo is not whether a person is innocent or guilty, but the person is deprived of his liberty in order to obtain information that could be used later in the trial stage. This means that there are no investigations to arrest a person, but the person is arbitrarily detained in order to be investigated, and in most cases to get an incriminating confession, thus contravening the basic principles of justice in a democracy," he criticized.Octavio Amezcua, attorney for the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights, agreed that to modernize the justice system and stop using arraigo, first there must be intensive training of all officials involved in the process. Spanish original
MV Note: Under arraigo, a suspect may be held without charges for forty days; by court order, it can be extended for an additional forty days. The UN Committee Against Torture (CAT) has condemned the use of arraigo and questioned the impunity that surrounds allegations of torture used to obtain confessions.