Nifonged in Nicaragua: Judge in Volz Case Under Fire Again By Nica Media

Earlier this month, Nicaraguan daily El Nuevo Diario reported that Judge Ivette Toruño Blanco, who presided over the farcical trial of Eric Volz in February, was under investigation by the country's Supreme Court for her role in the release of a convicted drug trafficker.

Citing the article written by Eloisa Ibarra of El Nuevo Diario, we commented:

An article published yesterday in a Managua daily newspaper, El Nuevo Diario, questions the integrity of Judge Ivette Toruño Blanco, the judge who sentenced American Eric Volz to 30 years in prison for the rape and murder of Doris Ivania Jiménez despite overwhelming evidence of his factual innocence. Toruño, whose blatant disregard for Nicaraguan law in the Volz case has fueled outrage in the US and growing skepticism from more reputable media outlets in Nicaragua, is currently under investigation by the Nicaraguan Supreme Court for her role in an unrelated case, according to El Nuevo Diario. Not surprisingly, El Nuevo Diario, which has been at the forefront of the local tabloid propaganda campaign against Volz, fails to note the connection of the current scandal involving Judge Toruño to her equally corrupt decisions at Volz's trial.

In announcing the investigation of Judge Blanco, Armengol Cuadra, president of the Supreme Court of Nicaragua, labeled the decision by Judge Blanco to suspend the three year jail sentence of José Ernesto Pineda Salvador "strange and abnormal" while noting that her decision is in defiance of the high court's mandate to treat drug trafficking cases involving high sums of money (Pineda Salvador was captured with $1.4 million secreted in the rear doors of his Honda Civic) with extreme care.

“We are going to investigate the circumstances in which the judge granted that benefit to him, because we have stressed that judges must act with extreme caution in the cases of drug trafficking when there is very high sums of money involved,” said Armengol Cuadra.

This week, El Nuevo Diario again takes aim at the ethically challenged Judge in an article entitled "Nepotism itches and extends in Rivenses Courts." Written by Lesber Quintero, who ironically wrote the most inflammatory of all the Nicaraguan attacks against Eric Volz and championed the appointment of Judge Toruño when she was appointed to replace the judge who freed Volz to house arrest when his life was threatened by the mob incited by Quintero's propaganda campaign, the END offering accuses the suspect judge of corruption and nepotism.

Quintero writes:

To speak of nepotism in the rivenses courts apparently is thing never to finish, and while it is investigated “more”, more extensive it is the list of workers of this institution who have familiar bonds with those who distribute justice in this department, and until with magistrate of the Supreme Court of Alba Luz Ramos Vanegas.

...

In order to facilitate, according to Lydia Marbely, the journalist, until one occurred to the task of leaving a quite defective letter with the names of the employees of the Judicial Power who could not be presented in the first publication, but that enjoys the nepotism, and in this sense the only excellent name that it indicates and that had not been part of our investigation is the one of the judge of the Penal District of Judgment, Ivette Toruño, to that indicates of being relative Mardin Alberto Rodríguez, who is employed as bailiff of that same judicial disctrict.

Charges of corruption and questionable rulings are not new for Judge Toruño Blanco. In 2001, Nicaraguan human rights organization CODENI accused the embattled judge of violating the rights of a young sexual abuse victim after an extensive investigation into Nicaraguan child sex trafficking.

In April we investigated the case of a girl of 11 years, abused sexually in Rivas, that was in pregnancy state. The man to whom this girl indicated like the author of the crime was sobreseído definitively by the Judicial one of District of the Crime of that locality, Ivette Toruño Blanco, in a judicial process which we considered totally irregular and in violation of the guarantees of process and the rights of the girl.

The CENIDH reviewed the judicial file that it was transacted in the Court of District of the Crime of Rivas and stated that Judge Ivette Toruño Blanco dictated the sentence of definitive nonsuit without taking in consideration the declaration from the girl and without making all the diligences necessary to clarify the facts. The CENIDH directed communication to the Magistrates of the Court of Appeals of IV the Region in Granada, where the case was been by the Resource of Appeal that the mother of the girl promoted through her lawyer. To the closing of this Report it had not been solved.

Human rights of the Childhood and the Adolescence

Codeni's description of Judge Toruño's willingness to disregard evidence is eerily reminiscent of her actions in the trial of Eric Volz.

MSNBC described some of the suspect rulings of Judge Toruño as follows:

At least 10 witnesses placed Volz in Managua, a more than two hours’ drive, and there are transcripts of lengthy Internet instant message conversations he had with a friend in Atlanta throughout the day. Still, the judge dismissed the evidence as not credible and relied on the testimony of Nelson Lopez Dangla that Volz was at the crime scene on the day Jiménez was hogtied, raped and killed.

Dangla was originally charged with being an accomplice but was released in exchange for his testimony and was never tried.

Covering the case for Outside Magazine, novelist Tony D'Souza outlined the ignored alibi evidence in detail:

And then I read the evidence regarding Volz's alibi: cell-phone records, a time-stamped instant-messaging log, page after page of statements by the ten people—most of whom I would later interview myself—supporting Volz's account. Shortly after 9:00 a.m., Volz maintained, he walked into the EP offices from his living quarters—the building also served as his home—and was seen by the security guard, the housekeeper, and various EP staff. From 10:30 to 11:00, model Maria Mercedes and a friend said they met with him. At noon, Ricardo Castillo, a Nicaraguan journalist who has contributed to the BBC and other news outlets, arrived; he and Volz then initiated a teleconference to Virginia with consultant Nick Purdy, a cofounding publisher of the music magazine Paste. As the conference progressed, Purdy and Volz exchanged instant messages on their impressions of Castillo, a potential contributor to EP. The call lasted nearly an hour. Following it, at roughly 1:15 p.m., Volz, Castillo, and Adam Paredes, EP's art director, sat down to a lunch of curried fish served by the housekeeper, Martha Carolina Aguirre Corea. Castillo left at 2:00. At roughly 2:45, Volz received a call informing him of Jiménez's death; more calls would quickly come in confirming it. Meanwhile, a local hairstylist, Rossy Elena Estrada López, had arrived to cut Volz's and another employee's hair; she found him talking on a cell phone, she said, "afflicted and crying." According to these witnesses, Volz left the office at roughly 4:30.

Volz's cell-phone records precisely match his account of what happened next: that he left Managua and drove to San Juan. At 4:38 p.m. the first call outside Managua appears on the log, the following 11 calls tracing the trajectory of someone driving quickly, arriving in the San Juan cellular area at 6:34. (I've since done this drive twice in the same amount of time. It requires driving fast but not inordinately so.)

Only one document cast suspicion on his alibi: a rental agreement from Hertz. Volz had called Hertz to rent a car to go to San Juan. (His, he said, was unreliable.) The agreement was printed at 3:11 p.m. at the Hertz office. But when the vehicle was delivered, EP assistant Leidy de los Santos, not Volz, signed the agreement. She went inside and returned with a credit-card slip bearing what appeared to be his signature, but the delivery driver never saw Volz himself.

The case for Volz's innocence seemed obvious, irrefutable.

In an update on the status of Volz's appeal, Tim Rogers of the Nica Times noted that Appellate Court Judge Roberto Rodríguez Baltodano was bewildered by Judge Toruño's rulings at Volz's trial.

Though Rodríguez stressed that the law prohibits him from opining on the case before officially handing down his verdict, there are parts of the case that admittedly have left him scratching his head.

Hopefully, Judge Rodríguez has noticed the mounting accusations against Judge Toruño as he continues to evaluate the pending appeal.