Supreme Court: bad news for Cuban spies

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that they won’t be reviewing the convictions of five Cuban intelligence operatives who appealed to the court on grounds of having received unfair trials due to the anti-Cuban feelings in Miami.

The justices were lobbied to review the espionage case by ten Nobel Prize winners and lawyers and legal groups from as many countries, but clearly to no avail. The five spies, now known as the ‘Cuban Five,’ are Ruben Campa, Rene Gonzalez, Gerardo Hernandez, Luis Medina and Antonio Guerrero. All were convicted of operating in the U.S. as unregistered Cuban agents and conspiring to penetrate U.S. military bases for espionage purposes.

One of the five – Gerardo Hernandez – is serving a life sentence because he was convicted of an additional charge – murder conspiracy in the deaths of four American pilots. Part of the Brothers to the Rescue organization, the Miami-based pilots’ planes were shot down off the coast of Cuba by Cuban fighter jets in 1996.

The Cuban Five have of course been received differently by different populations. In Cuba they are heroes, but to the exiled Cuban community in Miami – they are just getting what they deserve.

There’s been a little back and forth in the case, as at first, a federal appeals court in Atlanta reversed the convictions. The three judges on the panel agreed that it was not fair to hold the trial in Miami. The 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals, however, upheld the original convictions (with modified prison times for 3 of the 5), which is how we ended up at the Supreme Court.

Despite all the lobbying from overseas, the Obama administration did not think a Supreme Court review necessary, and as it turns out, neither did the court.

images courtesy of www.notmytribe.com and miamiherald.typepad.com