NEW YORK _ With less than a month to go before the trial of notorious Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman begins, his lawyers are under pressure to be ready.
Guzman's attorneys complained on Wednesday about having just three weeks to read through an estimated 13,000 pages of evidence recently handed over by federal prosecutors.
"This is a big case," Guzman's attorney Jeffrey Lichtman told reporters after a pretrial hearing at Brooklyn Federal Court. "It's too big, in my estimation, for it to be done competently (in) such short time after receiving the materials."
The infamous drug kingpin's defense team has repeatedly tried in vain to push back the start date of the highly anticipated trial, slated to begin Nov. 5.
On Wednesday, Lichtman called on prosecutors to rearrange the multitude of documents in a way that would make them easier to get through. U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan declined to issue such a ruling, though he acknowledged the heavy workload the lawyers face.
"Even your big cases might not be this big," the judge said.
The notorious leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, 61, has been awaiting trial in Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan since his extradition to the U.S. in Jan. 2017. Guzman, who successfully escaped from Mexican prisons on two separate occasions, has pleaded not guilty to a 17-count indictment that includes charges of drug trafficking, murder conspiracy and money laundering.
Outside of court, Lichtman said he and Guzman's two other attorneys, Eduardo Balarezo and William Purpura, will make the most of the time they have left.
"The problem is, I'm just one guy. We have other lawyers, but that's just two more guys," he said. "We're three men in a foxhole."
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