By Asya Farr

The Brooklyn trial of a former Haitian paramilitary leader convicted of mass murder in his native land and brought up on charges of grand larceny and mortgage fraud was postponed today but that didn’t stop his local critics from taking to the streets and demanding he be punished to the full extent of  the law.

Put off  till July was the trial of Emmanuel Constant, former commander of the Front for Advancement and Progress in Haiti, a right-wing military group accused of killing and torturing thousands of supporters of former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in the early 1990’s.

Labeled by critics as a “notorious Haitian human rights abuser,” Constant was recently indicted as a participant in a mortgage fraud ring that defrauded banks around the city. He was a real estate broker who sold houses in Cambria heights,
Queens, for Rigaud Realty.

In 2006 Constant, along with six other people involved was charged with grand larceny, forgery, and falsifying records for fraud that authorities said occurred from 2004 to 2006.

In 2007 he served 10 months of a one-to-three-year negotiated sentence for mortgage fraud on
Long Island. Sources say that prosecutors had agreed to a concurrent sentence of one-to-three years for similar charges in
Brooklyn.

At a hearing scheduled in May 2007 lawyers for the Federal Department of Homeland Security argued that Constant should be sentenced to time served for the mortgage fraud case in order to expedite his deportation to Haiti to face the outcome of his conviction in 2002, when a Haitian court sentenced Constant to life in prison for organizing a massacre of Aristide supporters in 1994 as a leader of FRAP. 

In 2002, before he could be detained by Haitian authorities, the 50-year-old defendant fled to the United States to a Haitian-American neighborhood in Queens. Outrage broke out in the Haitian community where Constant resided. Haitian and human right groups asked the U.S. government to extradite constant back to Haiti, so he would face the outcome of his trial, but U.S. officials said that the Haitian justice system was not equipped to give Constant a fair trial and he was allowed to reside in the U.S.

Officials also stated that Constant was allowed to work in the
U.S. Years later Constant was arrested for grand larceny and mortgage fraud charges. He remains in U.S. custody, but has not served his sentence for crimes he committed in Haiti.    

Some activists see the mortgage fraud trial as an opportunity for Constant to be punished for several of his offenses. They are asking that he be held accountable for crimes he committed in U.S. and
Haiti.  

A small group of protesters standing across the street from the court held signs that referred to Constant as a death squad leader. They talked to pedestrians through a megaphone while traffic passed by.

They asked that Constant serve the maximum sentence for crimes he committed in the U.S. then be deported to Haiti to serve time there.

“The problem now is there is so much political instability [in Haiti] and now with the food prices going up it will be very difficult to try him,” said Chaneen Cummings, a paralegal and representative of Center for Constitutional Rights. 

“We fear that he might go back and face a system which cannot properly give him the sentence he deserves,” she added.

Last year Constant was sued Manhattan Federal Court by a coalition of advocacy groups on behalf on Haitian women who testified that they were raped and tortured during Constant’s “campaign for violence against women,” said Cummings.  The plaintiffs were awarded $19 million in the civil case which the defendant never paid.

“He did not take it seriously,” she said.

“He seems to be taking every possible opportunity to delay the trail and drag things out,” said Kim Ives, a member of International Support Media Network.

He pointed out that this is the six or seventh time the trial has been delayed.

Ives said that pushing back the trial hindered protesters in their attempt to call attention to his crimes.

He added, “It is his strategy to try to wear us down.”