American cleared of murder isn’t home free

A Nicaraguan appeals court has ordered American businessman Eric Volz freed from prison, where he has been confined for nine months for a murder that all the evidence said he had no opportunity to commit. But on Tuesday, Volz’s friends and family began another fight — to actually gain his release and to get him safely out of the Central American country.

“We’re thankful that the appellate court made a decision for justice,” his mother, Maggie Anthony, told TODAY co-host Meredith Vieira from her home in Nashville on Tuesday. “Our concern is that I don’t understand how a government can not honor a decision that its court has made, and why Eric is still being held prisoner.”

On Nov. 21, 2006, Doris Ivania Jimenez was brutally raped and murdered in the dress shop she owned in the sleepy seaside Nicaraguan town of San Juan del Sur. Volz, her former boyfriend and publisher of a magazine promoting eco-friendly tourism, was among four people arrested in connection with the killing, which inflamed passions among the townspeople.

Three of the suspects were Nicaraguans. One was Jimenez’s boyfriend at the time of the murder and the other two were local small-time criminals. Volz had cell phone records and at least 10 witnesses that placed him two hours away in Managua, the capital city, at the time of the murder, but he was the only person brought to trial.

With the local Sandinista political party inflaming sentiment against the “gringo” who killed a local woman, angry crowds wielding machetes and demanding Volz’s death besieged the jail and courthouse during his trial. Last February, Judge Ivette Toruna Blanco found Volz guilty of the murder despite the lack of evidence and sentenced him to 30 years in prison.

Long, costly fight
Since then, Volz’s mother has spent most of her retirement funds fighting for her son’s release. On Monday, she got the news that the appeals court found no evidence that he committed the crime. But then she learned that Judge Blanco, on hearing the verdict, left her courthouse without ordering the 28-year-old Volz’s release.

“By keeping him in prison for another day, the judge raises the chances for this mob violence that tried to lynch him last year,” Tony D’Souza, an American journalist who investigated Volz’s case earlier this year, told NBC News in a report filed by Kerry Sanders. “It gives these people a chance to assemble a mob. He still has to get out of Nicaragua, even though he’s innocent.”

Anthony told Vieira that officials from the American Embassy in Nicaragua were initially denied access to her son on Monday. They were finally allowed to tell him he had been ordered freed that night, she said.

Volz’s health has suffered during his imprisonment, and he has spent the past 45 days in a police hospital battling various problems, including fungal infections, gastrointestinal issues and asthma.

“We’re worried about his safety,” Anthony told Vieira. “There’s a lot of local media on the news in Nicaragua about taking justice into their own hands. It’s a dangerous situation for him, and he’s an innocent man. He’s a free man. He should be let go.”

She last spoke to her son a week ago. “We just talk about his frustration,” she said of her regular phone calls to him in prison. “Our phone calls are always very difficult; they’re hard. You want to give him hope, and it’s difficult to have no news. I can’t even to begin to describe to you the pain of what it’s like hearing him and knowing where he’s at.”

Asked what she’d tell Nicaraguan officials, Anthony replied, “I want to say, honor what your system has done. Your appellate court has made the decision that my son is innocent and has said, ‘Let him go.’ Just do what your own court system has done.”

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