Oscar Corral has resurfaced at the Miami Herald. A source close to the Herald reports that he's:
Working as a general assignment reporter. He has been pulled from the Cuba beat and his Cuban connection website has vanished. The general assignment beat covers everything from quinceañera parties to dog and pony shows.Actually Corral's first report since he disappeared from the pages of the paper is about Pakistanis in south Florida who are keeping a close eye on the situation in their homeland. Corral's blog is still live but is no longer linked from the Herald. He has not posted on it since immediately after his arrest for soliciting prostitution.
On the legal front the Miami-Dade court clerk's office says that Corral's attorney asked for a continuance to prepare the case and therefore no trial date has been set.
A Herald Watch source opines that:
Continuances can be up to six months and a lawyer can ask for three continuances, delaying the case since the time of arrest for up to two years. They will eventually have to go to trial when the continuances run out unless he pleads out. The long postponements mean that the prostitute and pimp might not be around to testify. Yet, because the arresting policewoman is the main witness Oscarito is acorralado.
2 comments:
So what's there to prepare that would take so long? This seems to be about the simplest possible case. Still, it's a clever tactic. Of course, lawyers aren't lawyers for nothing.
Although it's no surprise by now, it's still quite remarkable that Nuevo Herald has practically ignored the Corral prostitution story, as if it had been ordered to "Don't ask, don't tell." It should have covered it at least as well as Herald Watch, and its failure to do so seems very telling. That failure casts a rather unflattering light on the person presumably in charge of the paper, editor Humberto Castello, whose capacity to act independently looks very questionable. It also raises the issues of who's really in control, what the paper's true "mission" is (especially given a touchy situation), and what trust it deserves from readers in terms of observing and pursuing their interests and concerns (as opposed to those of the institution or corporation). Not a good showing.
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