Ruling threatens US power as world’s high-seas drug police

MIAMI (AP) — Jeffri Dávila-Reyes says he's still mystified how he ended up serving hard time in a United States federal prison.

His cocaine bust at sea was closer to his homeland of Costa Rica than the United States, and the few kilos of drugs he was carrying were bound for Jamaica rather than American shores.

His plight is similar to hundreds of foreigners swept up by the US Coast Guard in international waters every year, most of them poor, semiliterate fishermen from Central and South America driven to smuggling with offers of more money than they've ever seen — in Dávila-Reyes' case $6,000.

“Nobody can be blamed for being born poor,” he wrote in a recent letter to The Associated Press.

But now, seven years into his 10-year sentence, Dávila-Reyes' conviction has been thrown out in a little-noticed ruling that threatens a key weapon in the United States' war on drugs: A decades-old law that gives the US broad authority to make arrests on the high seas anywhere in the world, even if the drugs aren't bound for the US.

It's a law that helps the US bolster its drug-interdiction numbers and flex its maritime muscle in a region where drugs are trafficked most. But since it often targets smugglers at the lowest rungs of the drug trade, it has yet to make a dent in the huge volumes of narcotics flowing into the US.

“It is a waste of US taxpayer dollars to have these costly misadventures as we play drug police to the world,” said Eric Vos, head of the public defender's office in Puerto Rico where Dávila-Reyes' case began. “Our enforcement efforts and multibillion-dollar expenditures should concentrate exclusively on drugs actually entering America.”

At issue is the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act, passed by Congress in 1986 at the height of the crack epidemic. It defines drug smuggling in international waters as a crime against the United States and gives the US unique law enforcement powers anywhere on the seas — whenever it determines a vessel is “without nationality.”

But how a vessel is deemed stateless sometimes gets messy.

When the Coast Guard chased down Dávila-Reyes' speedboat in the western Caribbean in 2015, he and two cousins who were seen frantically trying to dump packages of cocaine overboard identified their vessel as hailing from Costa Rica, according to the FBI's summary of the investigation.

But other than the markings on the boat's side resembling Costa Rica's flag, the men lacked any documentation proving its nationality. When the U.S. asked the Costa Rican government to confirm the vessel's registry, it responded 12 weeks after the bust that it could neither confirm nor refute the claim.

A few weeks later the men were charged and eventually pleaded guilty to possessing narcotics “on board a vessel subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.”

The conviction would have gone unnoticed if not for a challenge brought by a group of dedicated public defenders in Puerto Rico, where many of the drug cases are tried.

A three-judge panel of the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston ruled in January that the law's provisions — equating a nation's equivocal response to an outright denial of a captain's claim of nationality — were an unconstitutional extension of U.S. policing powers beyond America's borders.

Tellingly, almost none of those prosecuted under the law had ever set foot in the US nor were they charged with trying to import cocaine. In Dávila-Reyes' case, the five to 15 kilogramme of cocaine he was convicted of transporting were purportedly bound for dealers in Jamaica.

Despite the ruling, Dávila-Reyes remains behind bars as the Justice Department seeks reconsideration by all of the First Circuit's nine judges.

His two co-defendants were released in 2018 and 2020 after completing sentences of around five years each.

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