Despite claims of poor health and the coronavirus threat in prison, a once-powerful global narco-trafficker lost his bid to be released for “compassionate” reasons because he doesn’t deserve to be freed even at his advanced age, a Miami federal judge ruled Tuesday.
Gilberto Rodriguez-Orejuela, 81, failed to persuade U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno to let him go home to Cali, Colombia, because he found there is no “extraordinary and compelling” basis to end the inmate’s 30-year sentence for smuggling 200,000 kilos of cocaine into the United States in the 1980s and 1990s.
Moreno described the former Cali cartel kingpin as “no ordinary defendant” with a notorious reputation of dominating the world drug trade and destroying countless lives through violence and cocaine while amassing an illicit empire worth billions of dollars. The judge said that while Rodriguez-Orejuela has endured a litany of chronic illnesses including cancer, his criminal record is so repugnant that there is no way he could cut his sentence in half.
“The court is totally unwilling to undermine and undo such public respect for the law, as well as the gravity of the offenses committed, and the unyielding courage and tireless dedication of all United States law enforcement personnel involved in the front lines of Operation Cornerstone,” Moreno wrote in an 18-page order. He was referring to the federal crackdown on the Cali cartel that led to some 100 drug-trafficking convictions in Miami federal court.
Moreno also said the coronavirus outbreak, while “real” at the North Carolina facility where Rodriguez-Orejuela is imprisoned, “does not move the pendulum any closer towards compassionate release.”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office pressed hard to keep the infamous inmate behind bars, while his defense attorney mounted an arduous quest to free him in a petition filed months before the COVID-19 pandemic struck the United States earlier this year.
“We are very saddened and disappointed in the judge’s decision,” Miami lawyer David O. Markus said. “We should let old and sick inmates die at home with their families, not alone in a prison cell.”
Rodriguez-Orejuela, who has survived bouts of colon and prostate cancer in prison, maintained his health was “extremely fragile.” His lawyer also tried to build momentum around the public health crisis as it escalated in March.
“Because there were already sufficient reasons to release him, this crisis gives the court further reasons to grant his motion,” he said, citing a New York Times column on the viral threat in prisons nationwide.
Markus also cited a coronavirus directive by Attorney General William Barr instructing prison wardens to consider releasing inmates with non-violent criminal histories serving time in low-level and minimum-security facilities.
Federal prosecutors, already opposed to his release from the federal prison in North Carolina under any circumstances, scoffed at his strategy, saying Rodriguez-Orejuela did not fit the inmate profile Barr had in mind for release.
Rodriguez-Orejuela and his family led a powerful cartel based in Cali, Colombia, that revolutionized the cocaine-smuggling rackets by turning the deadly narcotics business personified by Pablo Escobar into a corporate-like enterprise that exported an estimated 200 tons of white powder worth $2 billion into the United States.
At a hearing in February, Moreno described Rodriguez-Orejuela as “a big-time drug dealer.” The judge made it clear that the violent drug-trafficking history of brothers Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez-Orejuela weighed heavily on his mind. The brothers pleaded guilty to cocaine-smuggling conspiracy charges in 2006, accepting a maximum prison sentence of 30 years, in exchange for the feds’ agreement not to charge their other family members in the massive drug case.
Moreno questioned whether the 2018 First Step Act passed by Congress should benefit a drug lord like Gilberto Rodriguez-Orejuela. The law aims to reduce the federal prison population by allowing inmates to seek relief without compromising public safety.
Before it passed, only the Director of the Bureau of Prisons could file a motion for compassionate release for inmates. Under the new law, families of inmates can file a motion with a federal judge after exhausting administrative options in the prison, which is what happened in Rodiguez-Orejuela’s case.