KEY WEST, Florida – After a previous failed attempt to make it to the United States, Cuban migrant Amil Gonzalez succeeded on his second try in July.
But his permanent home in his new country could wind up being a prison cell.
At a federal trial in Key West this week, prosecutors presented 13 witnesses to try to prove that the 32-year-old jeweler played a major role in a smuggling operation that resulted in a young woman’s death.
Gonzalez’s fate is now in the hands of 12 jurors, who were given the case Wednesday.
They will have to decide one question: Is Gonzalez a smuggler? Or was he simply a man on a desperate quest for freedom for himself and his pregnant girlfriend?
Two U.S. residents, Heinrich Castillo and Rolando Gonzalez, pleaded guilty last week to smuggling charges in the same deadly incident and are awaiting sentencing.
The government had a strong case against them, but the evidence against Amil Gonzalez is less clear cut.
It’s rare for a migrant being smuggled into the country to be charged with smuggling, so his lawyers decided to take their chances with a jury.
Gonzalez was charged with 67 counts including manslaughter, encouraging and inducing smuggling that resulted in death, conspiracy to smuggle aliens for profit, failure to stop for a U.S. Coast Guard boat and providing false information to government officials.
But before even going to jury Wednesday, nearly half the government’s case against Gonzalez crumbled. The prosecution’s key witness, migrant Rolando Montero, who came to the United States on the same boat as Gonzalez, refused to testify without immunity, invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Prosecutors said in court they had been counting on Montero to provide testimony that he paid thousands of dollars for the boat trip, bolstering the smuggling-for-profit charges.
Without the jury present, U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore dismissed the 32 counts that dealt with profit.
Prosecutors originally had elected not to grant immunity to any of the Cuban migrants who were allowed to stay in the United States as material witnesses. Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott Ray told the judge that, other than Montero, the migrants “did not tell the truth.”
The judge said he could not allow immunity at that stage because it would be grounds for a mistrial.
But the most serious counts against Gonzalez remain, and carry a maximum penalty of life in prison.
Amil Gonzalez’s girlfriend, Juliet Escandon, was one of the migrants on the boat and is due to give birth in less than a month.
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