(They weren't charged or convicted of spying,
but of "conspiracy" because there wasn't any
PROOF offered by the prosecution that they
had, in fact, engaged in any SPYING. Say it
once, say it a hundred times, but the media
continues to call them "spies". Still from
this it does appear that the prosecution in
the case was asked some sharp questions as
we see in the one about sovereignty below.

(It certainly sounds from this that what we
had heard before the case, that the defense
attorneys would only get three minutes per
defendant to address the court didn't turn
out to be accurate. This doesn't say how
much they DID get to speak, but it doesn't
seem to have been a very short hearing.)
==============================================

5 Cuban spies appeal long sentences, trial in Miami
By CATHERINE WILSON
Associated Press

March 10, 2004, 3:20 PM EST

MIAMI -- Appellate judges hearing a challenge to the
convictions of five Cuban spies and life sentences for
three of them focused Wednesday on details of a deadly
Cuban MiG attack and the trial judge's refusal to move
their trial out of Miami.

The three-judge panel questioned the prosecutor most
intently about what evidence linked Gerardo Hernandez, who
led a Miami-based ring, to the 1996 air-to-air missile
attack that killed four U.S. civilian fliers in
international airspace off Cuba.

The spies were the only ones who went to trial after they
were indicted in 1998 as part of the 14-member Wasp
Network. Hernandez was the only one charged in the attack.

All five admit being Cuban agents and were convicted in
June 2001 of serving as unregistered agents of a foreign
government. Evidence showed two targeted U.S. military
installations from Key West to Tampa and the ring spied on
Cuban exiles.

Judge Stanley Birch, leading the panel of the 11th U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals, asked for evidence in the MiG
attack that Hernandez ``was going to know that it would be
a murderous shootdown as opposed to one justified by their
sovereignty.''

Judge Phyllis Kravitch noted three times that the murder
conspiracy conviction required a plot to down planes in
international airspace and not over Cuba after 25
incursions into the communist island's airspace by planes
from a Cuban exile group in 20 months.

``How does he know when a plane is going to make an
incursion or not?'' Birch asked.

Prosecutor Caroline Miller pointed to coded message traffic
from Havana to Hernandez to make sure agents stayed off the
exile group's planes for a four-day period when two of
three planes were shot down Feb. 24, 1996.

Birch noted, ``He had no control over what they told him.''

Assistant Federal Public Defender Richard Klugh, arguing
for the spies, said it would take ``an extraordinary leap''
up the chain of command for Hernandez to know how Havana
might respond.

Leonard Weinglass, another attorney for the spies known for
taking cases of political radicals, maintained the trial
should never have been allowed in Miami. He cited prejudice
in a community with 500,000 Cuban-Americans who lost their
homeland to the government that sent the spies.

Prejudice on Cuban issues was the same reason cited a year
later by the Justice Department for trying to move a trial
out of Miami in a lawsuit over the federal government's
raid to seize the Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez, he told the
court.

The defense did not pursue a change of venue at one point
before trial ``when the court indicated it was receptive to
it,'' Miller said. ``This was a strategy and a choice that
these defendants made.''

Klugh also maintained that the life sentences for
Hernandez, Antonio Guerrero and Ramon Labanino on espionage
conspiracy charges were based on spying that uncovered no
U.S. secrets and was ``nothing more than a flea on a pimple
of the United States.''

Cuba has made the five spies a cause celebre, featuring
them on a Web site and issuing a CD of Guerrero's jailhouse
poetry set to music. Free the Five committees in several
countries are pushing for their freedom.

The Rev. Geoffrey Bottoms, a Catholic priest from
Blackpool, England, who heads the British committee, has
visited two of the spies in prison, corresponds with the
others and attended the hearing. No decision is expected
for months.

``They do believe that truth and justice will prevail in
the end,'' he said afterward. ``I think they will get
something in their favor.''

Paul McKenna, Hernandez's trial attorney, said he was
encouraged by the court's line of questioning. ``The
government was definitely on the defensive,'' he said.

The spies' only relatives at the hearing were the brother
and daughter of Rene Gonzalez, who received a 15-year
sentence. The fifth spy, Fernando Gonzalez, is serving 19
years.

Relatives of shootdown victims attended the trial as well
as Wednesday's hearing.

Miriam de la Pena, whose son Mario died in the attack,
called the defense arguments ``hypocritical.'' The agents
were ``so adamant about being true to the Cuban revolution,
killing was no problem for them.''

The hearing ``opened up a lot of wounds, not that they
heal, but they open up again,'' said Mirta Mendez, sister
of the late Carlos Costa. ``He had no idea what was going
to happen to him.''