Diego Olmos Alcalde, sat shackled and quiet in a Boulder courtroom as prosecutors charged him today with the kidnap, rape and murder of Susannah Chase.
Alcalde, 38, a slight man dressed in an orange and white striped prisoner’s jump suit, was arrested last month after his DNA matched genetic material taken from Chase’s body after her death in 1997.
The case of Alcalde has received heavy media attention in his native Chile, where there is no death penalty.
“It has had a big impact in the local press nationally and locally because of the possible outcome. We don’t have the death penalty in Chile, and as in Europe, whenever the U.S. raises the possibility, it is a shock. The last time Chile executed someone was in the 80s under a dictatorship,” said a staffer at Chile’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Santiago, who asked that his name not be used because he isn’t authorized to speak publicly.
Alcalde spent the first part of his life in Playa Ancha, a dirt poor section of Valparaíso, a port city in central Chile.
Chilean officials are monitoring the case and will provide Alcalde with aid if he or his family formally request intervention, said the ministry staffer. “We can’t just go in and say, “We’re going to defend this person. If he requests that, of course we are going to step in.”
The U.S. State Department has allowed other foreign nationals arrested for crimes committed here to be tried in their native countries, said Judd Golden, a lawyer who chairs the American Civil Liberties Union’s Boulder chapter.
“The State Department often will allow a national of another country to be tried or punished under that country’s laws, but it is totally discretionary,” he said.
And it is not unusual for foreign governments to help one of their nationals threatened with capital punishment by paying for a lawyer, said criminal defense lawyer David Lane. Most often countries offer legal aid “down South where the level of representation that the state provides their foreign nationals is abysmal,” Lane said.
As Alcalde, who came to Colorado to join his mother when he was 16, is an American citizen, there is little chance that federal officials would allow his trial in another country, Judd said.
Boulder and Colorado’s ACLU chapters have asked Boulder County District Attorney Mary Lacy not to pursue the death penalty for Alcalde.
“While Colorado has a death-penalty statute, the law in place at the time of Ms. Chase’s death was ruled unconstitutional in 2002. It is unclear if death would be a possible sentencing option here,” Golden said in a letter to Lacy dated Feb. 8.
Lacy said today that since the court ruled the statute, which has since been amended, unconstitutional, prosecutors aren’t sure Alcalde could be sentenced to death.
Prosecutors have not yet considered what sentence they will seek in the case.
Tom McGhee: (303)954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com
