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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | October 2005 
Mexican State to Use US-Style Trial System
 Tim Gaynor - Reuters
Nogales, Mexico - Mexico's Chihuahua state plans to use oral trials instead of traditional, written criminal hearings to try serious crimes beginning next year, prosecutors said on Thursday.
The announcement was welcomed by families of some of the more than 370 women who have been killed over the past 12 years in Chihuahua's Ciudad Juarez, an industrial city of 1.2 million located across the border from El Paso, Texas.
"It's just fantastic. With oral trials everybody can hear the evidence and see the process, and it will prevent a lot of injustices," said Victoria Caraveo, who represents 28 families of women murdered there.
Chihuahua state prosecutors said they will hold the first U.S.-style oral trials using a system of adversarial cross-examination in mid-2006, replacing an antiquated practice in which judges rule in criminal cases based on written evidence alone.
Several dozen suspects currently held for serious crimes, including homicide, rape and kidnapping, will be eligible for oral trials, prosecutors said.
The largely unsolved killings in Juarez have highlighted concerns at the way Mexican police and prosecutors conduct investigations and courts mete out justice.
"We believe that oral trials are much more simple and transparent, and will restore public confidence in the justice system," state prosecutor Patricia Gonzalez told Reuters in the northern city of Nogales by telephone.
President Vicente Fox's proposals to overhaul the justice system by implementing oral trials, depoliticizing prosecutors and professionalizing police are stalled in Congress, although Nuevo Leon state has implemented oral trials and other states are following suit. |
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