A former Haitian senator has been sentenced to life in prison for conspiring to kill Haiti’s President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, an assassination which caused unprecedented turmoil in the Caribbean nation.
John Joel Joseph is the third of 11 suspects detained and charged in Miami to be sentenced in what US prosecutors have described as a plot hatched in Haiti and Florida to hire mercenaries to kidnap or kill Moïse, who was 53 when he was shot dead at his private home near the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince on 7 July 2021.
Joseph, a well-known politician and opponent of the late president’s Tet Kale party, was extradited from Jamaica in June to face charges of conspiring to commit murder or kidnapping outside the United States and providing material support resulting in death, knowing or intending that such material support would be used to prepare for or carry out the conspiracy to kill or kidnap.
The sentencing came two months after Joseph signed a plea agreement with the government hoping to get a reduction in his sentence. In exchange, he promised he would cooperate with the investigation.
Federal judge José E Martínez handed down the maximum sentence at a hearing in Miami that lasted about 30 minutes.
At the hearing, Joseph asked for mercy and said that he never planned to kill the Haitian president.
“It turned out that the plan got overwhelmed, out of hand,” Joseph said in Creole. The plan changed to kill the president “but it was never my intention”, he added.
The judge said that he would consider a reduction of the sentencing if the government asked for it, but after listening to the former Haitian senator, Martínez ordered him to life imprisonment.
“Whether you attempted or not the assassination, you enter into dangerous territory,” Martínez said.
The other two people who have been sentenced in the case are the Haitian-Chilean businessman Rodolphe Jaar and retired Colombian army officer Germán Alejandro Rivera García. Both were sentenced to life in prison. Joseph Vincent, a dual Haitian-American citizen and former confidential informant for the US Drug Enforcement Administration, pleaded guilty this month and is awaiting his sentencing in February 2024.