Is Mexico considering deploying masked judges to protect organized crime suspects? –

According to The Telegraph UK, Mexico is considering using masked judges to try organised crime suspects in a bid to protect them from the brutal retaliation of drug cartels.

The proposal was added this week to a controversial package of judicial reforms being pushed through by outgoing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

The killings follow a series of assassinations of police chiefs, prosecutors and judges as the cartels’ power and reach have grown since López Obrador took office in 2018.

In one case, Judge Roberto Elías Martínez was shot by two men in December 2022 as he got into his car in the crime-ridden central state of Zacatecas.

Prosecutors subsequently alleged that the killing was ordered from a prison where two men whose cases the judge was overseeing were being held. In Zacatecas alone, 103 judges were said to have received threats.

The amendment to the planned judicial reform calls for “faceless judges” but leaves it up to senior judges to decide how to implement it.

A similar system was used in Peru in the 1990s to try suspected members of the terrorist group Shining Path, which regularly assassinated police officers, magistrates and other officials.

Some judges wore masks, while others sat behind screens in the courtroom. But the system was hugely controversial and resulted in multiple miscarriages of justice, eventually leading to new trials in which many suspects were acquitted.

Click here to read the full, original article on The Telegraph UK

Source: The Telegraph

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