People Smuggler Gets Life In Prison For Cuban Woman's Death
By David Cázares, Miami Bureau
Originally published in the Sun-Sentinel, November 22, 2002
In a dramatic and unprecedented ruling, U.S. District Judge James Lawrence King on Thursday sentenced a Miami man convicted of smuggling Cuban refugees to life in prison for a botched operation that resulted in a woman's death.
Describing Jorge Luis Aleman as a man motivated by profit and someone who had demonstrated a callous and reckless disregard for human life, King veered from federal sentencing guidelines that would have permitted him to send Aleman to prison for up to 12 years and seven months in favor of the harshest sentence allowed by law.
It was the toughest sentence ever imposed in South Florida, where smuggling defendants, even in cases where there have been deaths, have received relatively light sentences.
King said the senseless manner in which Cira Rodriguez died and Aleman's responsibility for her death, as well as his reckless behavior during the operation, had earned him a tougher penalty.
The judge ruled Aleman grossly overloaded his 26-foot speedboat with 22 passengers, brandished a firearm to force seven male passengers into the water to escape the Cuban border patrol and later abandoned Rodriguez and other injured passengers on a deserted island in the Bahamas.
Aleman and co-defendant Gaspar Coll-Gonzalez, also of Miami, pleaded guilty in May to one count of attempting to smuggle an illegal immigrant resulting in death and one count of conspiracy to smuggle refugees in January 2001. Prosecutors had decided not to seek the death penalty and a pre-sentence report had recommended a sentence within federal guidelines.
The judge also cited Aleman's history of smuggling and his "modus operandi" of forcing people into the water so that Cuban pursuers would rescue them and allow him to get away.
King also said the two men had made no effort to notify U.S. or Bahamian authorities of the refugees' location or plight.
"Congress has determined that alien smuggling in the egregious case, the outrageous case, warrants life imprisonment," King said. "If this case does not meet those requirements, I cannot imagine a case that does."
King also sentenced Aleman to five years for smuggling and said the sentences will run consecutively. He also ordered him to serve eight years on parole, which prosecutors said would apply only if the life sentence is commuted.
Citing the apparent first offense of Coll-Gonzalez, and the fact he went on the trip to collect his wife and child, the judge sentenced him to the maximum sentence under federal guidelines of seven years and three months on the death-related charge and five years on the other smuggling charge.
Those sentences will run concurrently, meaning Coll-Gonzalez will serve only the longer term, and then be subject to three years' probation.
The ruling was immediately hailed by advocates for stricter controls on illegal human-smuggling as one that could have a chilling effect on such operations.
"This is very harsh punishment," said Pedro Freyre, a Cuban-American attorney and activist. "I hope it would function as a restraint on people trying to do this."
Cira Rodriguez, who waded through waist-high swamps for hours to reach the boat and suffered a head injury during the smuggler's attempt to flee a Cuban patrol in a similar boat on rough seas, died on Anguilla Cay.
The 14 others were left there for five days, eating snails and cactus when their food supplies ran out, and buried Rodriguez there.
They were picked up by another boat, which defense attorneys said was sent by Aleman.
For Rodriguez's only daughter, Yunis Gonzalez, who longs to find her mother's body, the day of court-imposed justice provided some solace.
But Yunis Gonzalez, who cried throughout the hearing, was unhappy about the two men's claims her mother was ill before the trip and that they never brandished a weapon to frighten the refugees.
"I do have a 3-year-old daughter who will never meet her grandmother," she said. "My grandmother in Cuba wants to find where she is. She wants to know at least what happened. I want to ask this court if at some time they ask for mercy I want them to say at least where my mother is."
Aleman's attorney, Howard Schumacher, told King his client had tried to cooperate with law enforcement officials searching for the body, but unfortunately was not there when she died. Schumacher also conceded that Aleman, who charged $8,000 each for the trip, was motivated by profit but said his client had been a dissident in Cuba where he had been jailed and beaten.
"There is very little that we as a society place greater value on than human life," Schumacher said. "Probably one of the things that we trade that off on is the price of freedom."
Prosecutors told the judge the voyage had turned deadly because the two men were more interested in saving "their own skins" by avoiding capture than in the lives of their passengers.
"This is a case where the two men had choices at several points during this incident, a choice between protecting their own self-interest and human lives," Assistant U.S. Attorney Curtis Minor said.
Before being sentenced, Aleman said he never intended for Rodriguez to die.
"I only made a mistake," he said. "I feel extremely sorry."
Coll-Gonzalez also apologized.
"My only intention was to bring my wife and my daughter so that they would be able to know what freedom is," he said.
King was unmoved, particularly in Aleman's case, saying that it "strains credibility" to suggest the gun was taken along to threaten the Cuban border guards as opposed to the boat's passengers. He said the life sentence was in order because insufficient weight had been given to the tragedy of Rodriguez's death.
Afterward, attorneys for both men said they would appeal to the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta.
Outside the federal courthouse, Aleman's sister, Marta Aleman, who was on the boat during the smuggling operation, said her brother was unfairly singled out in the government's war on smuggling.
"He is not to blame for the death of this person," Marta Aleman said. "The guilty ones are her family in Cuba."
They sent her here, she said.
Marta Aleman also said her family wants an appeal because prosecutors relied on the testimony of Cuban government officials.
U.S. Attorney Marcos D. Jimenez, however, hailed the sentence as a victory in the battle against the smuggling of refugees.
"Over the years we have lost thousands of lives at sea at the hands of alien smugglers," Jimenez said. "The message of this case is we are going to pursue these cases in a very serious way. We're not going to stop."
