As the World Turns: It turns for my friend Harvey

By Ed Rogers

In my December 29, 2015 account of my friend Harvey’s Costa Rica tale, “Shots in the night,” I reported Harvey’s fleeing Costa Rica after living there for 11 years, getting married (to Ileana), buying a house and a bar and land on the coast, and even becoming a citizen of Costa Rica, which meant he could then own guns.
    Consequently, he had started carrying a loaded .45 everyplace he went. As I wrote that December, this turned out to be his downfall, because one night when Harvey and Ileana visited the bar, which they had leased to a Costa Rican couple, they found the couple and several other people removing everything, including the toilets. When the people wouldn’t drop the stuff and put up their hands, Harvey pulled his gun and fired into the air.

    A week later, the couple filed a complaint that Harvey had fired at them. They were taking shrewd advantage of the little-known Costa Rican law that it’s the Tico’s word against the gringo’s, and it never turns out well for the gringo. Because the authorities could arrest and hold Harvey for up to a year in jail without charging him (while the prosecutor built a case), he took off.

Well, there have been some new developments.
    The following January found Harvey in Southern California, where he told me he was “freezing his ass off and had a cold for the first time in 5 years” (the last time he had been back to the States).
    But this July, a year and half later, Harvey was back in Costa Rica to fight in court. He reported that his first day in court was long because

the district attorney had to send the cops to root her complainant and his “witness” (the complainant’s brother) out of the shit holes they slid into trying to avoid the inevitable. They get dragged in by the cops and proceed to engage in easily provable lies, contradictions, and changed stories during their brief testimony and cross-examination.
    The Costa Rican FBI agent who signed the police report is a no-show.
    And then the DA’s “star witness,” the only other person to have claimed in the “police report” to have seen me carrying a gun, turns out to be an illegal Nicaraguan who hasn’t been in the country for over a year. But the DA wants to send out the Mounties to track him down. At about four p.m., with plenty of time to wrap it up, the judge claims she is tired and puts the trial off until the 21st, allowing the DA to have the police conduct a daily search for the Nicaraguan for the next ten days, devoting money and manpower to the undertaking. The communities being searched constitute a population of perhaps four hundred people, all of whom could be repeatedly interviewed perhaps fifty times in ten days.
    Nevertheless, it was looking good for acquittal.

But then, “the entire judiciary went on strike,” and Harvey’s case was postponed again, until the following week, leading Harvey to comment, “Death is looking good as an alternative outcome.”
    Harvey reminded me that he and Ileana, and their lawyer (first name Mauricio) have to travel over two hours to get to court, and they have to pay the travel, the lodging, and other expenses, and have “done so repeatedly over the many months to comply with every detail of court orders.”

On the 20th, one day before the newly scheduled court appearance, the entire judiciary of the country went on strike. The “trial" was rescheduled for the 26th.
    Once again, we show up, at 1:30 p.m. this time. The Nicaraguan is removed from the witness list for cause. The FBI report is removed from the evidence list for cause. The DA summarizes, pointing out (with no evidence, doctor’s reports, public health records, or anything else) that the complainant is a person of small stature, physically and mentally handicapped, and, therefore, his story should be accepted at face value, based only on that criterion. That is, the DA was opining on medical matters that she is totally unqualified to judge, asking for a guilty verdict and six months in prison for me.
    Mauricio summarizes.
    The judge says she’ll issue her decision in the morning, thus necessitating another night in a hotel for me and Ileana, who has an appointment the following day and must leave.

    Harvey had already told me that, in the car on the way to this court date, he and Mauricio had discussed the differences between trial-by-jury and trial-by-judge, and Mauricio “would much rather argue a case in front of a judge, someone educated and able in matters of law, than in front of a jury, who might be swayed by emotional considerations. ‘Oh, he’s just a poor handicapped little fellow,’ he says they might think, and accept his complaint out of sympathy, whereas a judge is bound by the law. Costa Rica law says very clearly that in a criminal trial, the complaint must be supported by evidence other than the testimony of the complainant.”
    Anyway, Harvey continues the narrative in the courtroom:

The morning arrives, the judge says that the complainant is a little guy who is handicapped (to the best of our knowledge, the judge is no more qualified to make this diagnosis than the DA), and she believes him – based on that “fact.” Guilty, six months suspended.
    Poor Mauricio. He is outraged. He promises to appeal and not charge me for the process. On August the fourth, a fifteen-day period begins during which we must file the appeal. I look forward to the saga that, fortunately, I am not required to attend. Meanwhile, I have my liberty and, for the first and only time in my life, a criminal record.

By my calculation, the deadline for Harvey’s lawyer to file the appeal is today, August 19. I assume that it has been filed. But it might be a while before we learn the outcome. The world continues to turn.

Copyright © 2017 by Ed Rogers