At 81 years old Maria del Carmen Polit Molestina She died last Tuesday without being able to be with her husband, Nelson Serrano (83 years old), Ecuadorian sentenced to death in the United States in 2007 for four murders that occurred in Bartow, Florida, in 1997. A case that has been in the headlines for 25 years and has been denounced for serious flaws in the process.
She passed away after battling cancer at the home of one of her daughters in Indianapolis, Indiana (U.S).
Pólit had not seen Serrano since 2018, when he paid him, along with his three children, a visit on the death row of the Union Correctional Institutionin Florida.
Death row is the area where those sentenced to capital punishment are, usually in a high security prison, awaiting the moment in which their sentence becomes effective. However, for years his family, a team of lawyers and the Ecuadorian State have protested the lack of evidence in Serrano’s trial.
Oscar Vela, who is part of Serrano’s legal team and writer of the book The Bartow Murders On the subject, he comments that two appeals are currently pending in the case.
The first is the resentencing remedy that must be exhausted before being filed. The intention with this resource, whose time has been unjustifiably extended for four years by the Florida justice system, is to remove the death penalty and place a life sentence on him for the constitutional violations in the process.
The next resource will be presented once the first one is resolved. The objective of this second resource will be to obtain a habeas federal, a resource where you can declare innocence, repeat the evidence hearing, at which time they would present the evidence that proves Serrano’s innocence.
“Resources have been unjustifiably delayed and justice (in Florida) is very afraid of touching this case… because it is an uncomfortable case where evidence of corruption of the Police and the Prosecutor’s Office will be presented and in favor of the innocence of Nelson Serrano”, says Vela.
Serrano has been locked up for 20 years waiting between the sentence being carried out or the green light being given to review his process, full of irregularities. Starting at the time of the quadruple murder, he wasn’t in Bartow, Florida, he was in Atlanta, Georgia.
“They use (to convict him) evidence that is clearly fraudulent, which is a fingerprint printed on a supposed ticket of the parking lot of the Orlando airport, also very far from the place of the crimes”, says Vela, who adds that there is evidence that other people intervened in the place of the murders, there are fingerprints, DNA fingerprints, weapons, which were hid to frame Serrano.
Apparently it was a group of assassins who acted that day.
“We have the names, we have a lot of fairly accurate and clear information about who they could have been and for what reasons, and all of that is part of what is going to be presented in the resources,” says Vela.
Serrano was in Ecuador after the sentence and in Quito he was kidnapped in an illegal operation carried out by Ecuadorian police officers without authority who worked for a US police officer, a prosecutor, and a Pichincha mayor. “Well, for a series of characters,” says Vela, who recalls that Serrano was tortured and hidden in a dog cage until they put him on a plane at the old Quito airport.
Vela also says that he is in permanent contact with Serrano via email, and that he has health problems and is constantly harassed by the prison guards.
“We have already filed complaints, in fact the Ecuadorian government is helping us and has made two very strong communications against the people in the prison. The Ecuadorian consul has also spoken with Nelson Serrano the day before yesterday and has the respective complaint about what they are doing to him in prison. We hope that all this will help us, because in addition to being in prison, he is innocently harassed by the guards,” says Vela.
In previous years, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) recommended Serrano’s release. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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