The lawyer for Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán’s wife is content with knowing that the mother of the jailed drug lord’s twin daughters will not be spending the rest of her life behind bars.
Emma Coronel, 32, is scheduled to appear before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Tuesday and is expected to be sentenced to four years in prison, a recommendation made two weeks ago by U.S. federal prosecutors.
Jeffrey Lichtman, a criminal defense attorney, said that while part of him is pleased that her role was minimal, another part is sad that she has suffered so much over the past year. This interview aired Monday on Noticias Telemundo.
Emma Coronel, the wife of Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, will be sentenced in a Washington, D.C. federal court Tuesday. A four year sentence has been recommended by the prosecution.
Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán is serving a life sentence at ADX Florence in Colorado
Coronel, who was born in California and was only 18 years old when she married a then-50-year-old El Chapo in 2007, pleaded guilty on June 10, acknowledging she conspired to traffic drugs and launder money for Sinaloa Cartel kingpin.
El Chapo, who was convicted of the crime on February 12, 2019, is currently serving a sentence for life at Florence’s ADX Florence super-maximum security prison.
The former beauty queen, who was arrested at Dulles International Airport in Virginia on February, was looking at a lengthy jail sentence before her legal team sought the safety valve exception, which required Coronel to meet a series of guidelines that would reduce her sentence.
She would need to show that she wasn’t the leader, organizer or supervisor of the offense and can also prove she didn’t use violence in its commission.
Coronel was also required to tell the government everything he knew about the incident and related misconduct under the safety valve exception.
Evidently, she did check all the boxes.
Lichtman explained to the network, “Emma Coronel will not go away to prison for her whole life. In fact she was going to prison only for 10 years.” “She participated in very little.”
Prosecutors requested that Emma Coronel receive a five-year sentence of supervised release with a $1.5million fine
Emma Coronel was only 18 when she married a then 50-year-old Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán in 2007
A court document states that U.S.prosecutors requested she be sentenced for five years of supervised freedom and a $1.5million fine.
Lichtman told Noticias Telemundo also that Coronel wouldn’t be in a witness Protection Program and that he would not cooperate in federal prosecutors’ future investigations into the transnational drug trafficking organisation that El Chapo cofounded. It is currently under control of his sons, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada.
Mariel Colón, who also forms part of a defense team that also represented El Chapo, told Univision earlier this month that Coronel would not provide any information on the cartel to federal investigators because doing so would have exposed her daughters and family members.
‘She has (her two) girls in Mexico and it is very well known what happens to cooperators or to the family of collaborators,’ Colón said. Colon said, “Why expose and risk her daughters’ lives, her family’s life, when she can access another resource to help her?”