SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic: A panel of Dominican judges has upheld decades-long prison sentences for three men convicted in the 1975 murder of journalist Orlando Martinez.
The judges upheld maximum 30-year sentences for former Sgt. Mariano Cabrera Duran and Rafael Alfredo Llubere, who have already spent a decade in prison since their arrests.
Former Gen. Joaquin Antonio Pou Castro's sentence was reduced from the maximum to 20 years. A fourth man convicted in the slaying, Maj. Luis Emilio de la Rosa, was released from prison last week after completing his 10-year term.
The sentences were read Monday evening in a crowded courtroom in San Pedro de Macoris, some 60 kilometers (37 miles) east of Santo Domingo.
Martinez, a member of the outlawed Dominican Communist Party and editor of an opposition magazine, was shot to death March 17, 1975, on an avenue near the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo.
Relatives said he had been warned that his reporting offended then-President Joaquin Balaguer, a longtime collaborator of dictator Rafael Trujillo, who was elected president in 1966 after a U.S. invasion and held power for much of the next three decades.
Investigations into the death were stalled until Balaguer retired and President Leonel Fernandez, then in his first term, ordered the case moved to trial in 1997.
Cabrera Duran was extradited in 1999 from New York, where he had been operating a liquor store in the Bronx, and the four defendants were convicted in a 2000 decision hailed as the dawn of a freer and fairer era of Dominican justice.
But Balaguer, who died in July 2002, never faced trial over his alleged cover-up of the slaying due to poor health.
In his 1988 book "A Courtier's Memories During the Trujillo Era," he left a blank page, saying a "friend" would fill in the truth about the journalist's killing "many years after my death."
Former Air Force Chief Salvador Lluberes Montas, who at the time of Martinez's death was one of Balaguer's closest military advisers, was implicated in the case but has so far also avoided trial because of poor health.
