{"id":8590,"date":"2025-11-18T04:25:55","date_gmt":"2025-11-18T04:25:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/angel-del-villar-to-stay-out-of-prison-during-appeal-judge-rules\/"},"modified":"2025-11-18T04:25:55","modified_gmt":"2025-11-18T04:25:55","slug":"angel-del-villar-to-stay-out-of-prison-during-appeal-judge-rules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/angel-del-villar-to-stay-out-of-prison-during-appeal-judge-rules\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00c1ngel del Villar To Stay Out Of Prison During Appeal, Judge Rules"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n

\n\tMusic executive \u00c1ngel Del Villar<\/strong> will remain a free man while he appeals his convictions for doing business with Mexican drug cartels, a federal judge said.<\/p>\n

\n\tDel Villar was scheduled to report to prison on Dec. 1 to begin serving his four-year prison sentence on the cartel-ties convictions, but Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong<\/strong> on Friday granted his request to stay out on bond during the appellate process. Such appeals can take a year or more to resolve.<\/p>\n

\n

\n

\t\t\t\t\tRelated\t\t<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tSiding with arguments last month by Del Villar\u2019s attorneys, the judge said the convicted executive had cleared the low bar for remaining free: that his appeal raised sufficiently arguable points about her jury instructions that an appellate court might<\/em> be persuaded.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cDel Villar need only show that his appeal raises a fairly debatable question,\u201d Judge Frimpong wrote in her decision, obtained by Billboard<\/em>. \u201cThe Court finds that\u2014although the Court does not see any error in its trial rulings or in its jury instructions\u2014that at least the question of the deliberate ignorance instruction is a \u2018fairly debatable\u2019 one.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tA spokesman for the federal prosecutors on the case, who opposed Del Villar\u2019s request to remain on bond, declined to comment on the ruling.<\/p>\n

\n\tDel Villar, who founded his Del Records in 2008, built the label into a powerhouse for regional Mexican music, home to supergroup Eslabon Armado, Lenin Ramirez and other chart-topping artists.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut in June 2022, federal prosecutors unveiled charges against Del Villar, 41, CFO Luca Scalisi, 56, and Del Records under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act \u2013 a statute that allows the U.S. to impose targeted sanctions on foreign individuals involved in the illegal drug trade and ban U.S. residents from doing business with them.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe feds claimed that Del Villar had repeatedly arranged concerts with Jesus P\u00e9rez Alvear, a Guadalajara-based promoter with cartel ties. And at a March trial, superstar Gerardo Ortiz took the stand to testify against Del Villar, saying he had seen P\u00e9rez Alvear at the Del Records offices and had himself performed at one of the promoter\u2019s concerts.<\/p>\n

\n

\n

\t\t\t\t\tRelated\t\t<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Angel<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tDel Villar\u2019s defense attorneys argued back that he had been \u201cmanipulated\u201d into working with P\u00e9rez Alvear by a \u201ctrusted\u201d former employee. But the jury didn\u2019t buy it, finding him guilty on 10 counts of violating the Kingpin law, as well as one conspiracy charge. In August, Judge Frimpong sentenced him to 48 months in prison on those convictions.<\/p>\n

\n\tWith that sentence looming and his appeal still in the earliest stages, Del Villar\u2019s attorneys urged the judge to postpone his December prison report date. In the process, they also previewed how they will likely challenge the verdict on appeal.<\/p>\n

\n\tThey say they have a particularly strong argument on how the judge instructed jurors that they could convict Del Villar by finding that he willfully blinded himself to P\u00e9rez\u2019s shady connections. They say prosecutors couldn\u2019t prove he took concrete actions to avoid such knowledge, but that Judge Frimpong gave the jurors that option anyway.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe government pointed to no evidence \u2014 and the record contains none \u2014\u00a0 from which a jury could conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Del Villar took \u2018deliberate actions\u2019 or made \u2018active efforts,\u2019 his lawyers wrote, later adding that the judge\u2019s instruction \u201cwent to the heart and most hotly contested aspect of the case.\u201d<\/p>\n


\"Billboard
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Music executive \u00c1ngel Del Villar will remain a free man while he appeals his convictions for doing business with Mexican drug cartels, a federal judge said. Del Villar […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8591,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[5172,366,2979,423,223,351,2691,5173],"class_list":["post-8590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-angel","tag-appeal","tag-del","tag-judge","tag-prison","tag-rules","tag-stay","tag-villar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8590\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}