No Verdict in Mexican Lawman’s Trial

A federal jury went home for the weekend without reaching a verdict in the perjury trial of Mario Martinez Herrera, the Mexican internal security officer accused of lying to the grand jury investigating the kidnaping and killing of U.S. drug agent Enrique Camarena.

In his closing argument Friday morning before U.S. District Judge J. Lawrence Irving, defense attorney Michael P. Murray sought to discredit the prosecution’s key witness--wheelchair-bound Mexican lawyer Cesario Garciabueno--whom he derided as a paid “snitch.”

Murray also questioned the significance of an FBI expert’s testimony matching Martinez’s hair with strands found in the house in Guadalajara, Mexico, where Camarena was tortured last year.

Justice Department attorney James Wilson, who is directing the grand jury investigation of Camarena’s death, argued that Garciabueno--paralyzed when an assailant shot him two years ago for cooperating with the Drug Enforcement Administration--had testified believably.

Wilson noted, too, that the FBI expert did not claim the hair match was ironclad proof that Martinez had been at the site of Camarena’s interrogation and torture, but rather that it was proof enough to satisfy the jury’s reasonable doubts about Martinez’s whereabouts.

Martinez, 38, is charged with lying to the grand jury by denying he had ever been in Guadalajara, except in transit to other locations.