Assistant Public Defender Robert Torres is asking the Superior Court to disregard the Department of Public Safety’s voice-taped interview with a man charged with aggravated assault, saying such piece of evidence was obtained improperly.<\/p>\n
The taped interview with Sergio Inabangan is expected to be presented by prosecutors in a trial scheduled for Dec. 2.<\/p>\n
The interview, which was conducted allegedly without the presence of a legal counsel for the defendant, contains Inabagan’s self-incriminating statements and admissions to the offense which he was charged with.<\/p>\n
Torres has filed a motion to suppress the defendant’s statements, charging that investigators Eddie Chen and Jesus Cepeda interrogated Inabangan without properly advising him of his rights to get legal assistance from a counsel and consular officers.<\/p>\n
Inabanagan, a Filipino national whose native language is Tagalog, was arrested on July 12, 1998 in connection with a stabbing incident in San Vicente.<\/p>\n
Torres said that although the two investigators read the Miranda rights to Inabangan, there was no interpreter around during the interrogation to translate it in Tagalog.<\/p>\n
Torres also said the investigators did not notify the Philippine Consulate while Inabagan was in detention for 17 hours.<\/p>\n
The investigators’ failure to do so, Torres added, constitutes a violation of the Vienna Convention, a 1969 treaty that deals with consular relations among signatory countries.<\/p>\n
Under the treaty, an individual has the right to get consular assistance after his arrest.<\/p>\n
The treaty also provides that the consular office should be informed accordingly when a foreign citizen is in the custody of authorities of the host country.<\/p>\n
“The benefit to DPS gained from their violation of the Vienna Convention is that the delay in the notice afforded DPS to detain a foreign national for an extended period of time and subject him to interrogation while he remained without the benefit of a counsel,” Torres’ motion said. (MCM)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Assistant Public Defender Robert Torres is asking the Superior Court to disregard the Department of Public Safety’s voice-taped interview with a man charged with aggravated assault, saying such piece of evidence was obtained improperly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47558\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}