He was mayor of a town in Haiti. Now he has to pay his victims $15M, U.S. court rules
A former mayor of a small town in Haiti’s western region has been ordered by a federal court in Boston to pay $15.5 million in damages after being found guilty in a civil case of torture, extrajudicial killings, attempted killing and arson.
Jean Morose Viliena, a U.S. resident in Malden, Massachusetts, was appointed mayor of Les Irois in Haiti’s Grand’Anse region in 2012 by then-President Michel Martelly. He got the job despite a murder indictment in the Haitian courts.
Five years later, Viliena, now working as a school bus and Uber driver in the Boston area, was sued in federal court in Massachusetts. The suit was filed by the San Francisco-based Center for Justice & Accountability, along with the multinational Dentons law firm and Morrison & Foerster on behalf of three Haitian men who accused Viliena and his political allies of political persecution that included human rights abuses.
On Tuesday, after five days of trial that included expert witnesses, a jury found in favor of plaintiffs David Boniface, Juders Ysemé and Nissage Martyr.
“I am very happy and feel very proud because the American justice system has given us justice. For 15 years, we’ve been fighting in Haiti to find justice and could never find it,” Ysemé told the Miami Herald after the verdict. Every time they thought they had a court date in Haiti, he said, Viliena used his influence to thwart justice. “They never called him before the courts.”
Ysemé, 36, said he was at a radio station in Les Irois that Viliena had announced in advance he was going to attack. Viliena entered “with guns and machetes” with his group, Ysemé said. “He beat me and after he beat me... issued orders to shoot me. I lost my right eye,” Ysemé said.
Attorney Daniel McLaughlin with the Center for Justice & Accountability said the lawyers and their clients are “overjoyed with this verdict.”
“It’s an acknowledgment of the harms that they suffered, the killings, the torture, the attempted extrajudicial killings,” he said.
The lawsuit was filed under the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991. The law allows civil lawsuits to be filed in the U.S. against foreign officials who commit wrongdoing in their countries if the victims are unable to get justice in their own countries.
McLaughlin said the judge acknowledged that it was “futile” for the plaintiffs to try to seek justice in Haiti because of corruption and a dysfunctional judicial system — and because of the threats of retribution against those who dare to go after powerful politicians.