Ramirez, Yuby - Miami woman freed from life sen...

Yuby Ramirez, previously destined to die in prison for her bit part in a murder plot hatched to protect Miami cocaine smugglers Willie Falcon and Sal Magluta from the law, became a free woman Tuesday.

U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard vacated Ramirez’s life sentence for her supporting role in the conspiracy to kill a government witness, who was going to testify against Falcon and Magluta at the end of the cocaine-cowboy era in the 1990s.

Lenard found that Ramirez’s original lawyers gave her such bad advice — to reject a sweet government plea offer before her 2001 trial — that her sentence should be thrown out.

In exchange, Ramirez pleaded guilty to a new offer of 10 years, which led to her immediate release from federal prison for time served: 12 years. But because Ramirez, 41, is a Colombian national without U.S. citizenship, she will be detained by immigration authorities for deportation to her native country.

Still, after years of appeals, Ramirez hugged her current attorneys David O. Markus and Robin Kaplan, then turned to smile at her husband Edison Duran, before two U.S. marshals escorted her out of the courtroom in shackles.

“I am very happy for her,” said Duran, who had known Ramirez before she was imprisoned and married her while she was incarcerated at a federal prison in Tallahassee. “It has not been easy.”

Markus, who has battled federal prosecutors and the judge for eight years, praised Lenard for doing the “right thing.” He said the next challenge will be to fight Ramirez’s deportation, arguing that her life would be endangered if she were deported to Colombia.

“She would like to stay here, if possible,” Markus said, noting her two grown daughters live in Miami. “There are dangerous people associated with this case in Colombia.”

The breakthrough in Ramirez’s appeal came in April, when Lenard found that the woman’s original attorneys — former Miami federal public defenders Mary Barzee and Reuben Camper Cahn — “prejudiced” her defense when they advised her to reject five- and 10-year plea offers from prosecutors.

Ramirez had been convicted of participating in a 1993 plot to kill a Falcon-Magluta associate, Bernardo Gonzalez, before he could testify against the pair of Miami High dropouts-turned-big-time-cocaine-bosses.

Falcon, who cut a plea deal, and Magluta, convicted at trial, are respectively serving 20 years and 195 years in prison.

As part of her new plea agreement Tuesday, Ramirez also admitted guilt in a conspiracy to execute another cocaine hauler, Luis Escobedo, outside a Coconut Grove nightclub in 1992. He, too, was going to testify against the drug duo.

Ramirez maintained at a February court hearing that she would have accepted a government plea offer of five or 10 years if her attorneys had warned her she faced a potential life sentence.

Instead, Ramirez said her lawyers mistakenly advised her not to accept the government’s plea offers because they believed that even if she were convicted, she would have faced three to 10 years’ imprisonment, at most.

In her recent ruling, Judge Lenard found “a reasonable probability that, but for counsel’s misadvice, Ramirez would have accepted the government’s offer and pled guilty.”

Her appellate attorney, Markus, asserted that her life sentence was a travesty in light of the fact that the two Colombian brothers who organized the contract hits on the Magluta-Falcon associates ultimately received six years in prison.

One of the so-called snitches, Gonzalez, ran the duo’s Bahamas-Miami drug operation. He was gunned down at his West Miami-Dade home June 22, 1993.

Ramirez, 21 at the time, had met the Colombian brothers at a local nightclub.

At Tuesday’s hearing, federal prosecutor Michael Davis said Ramirez participated in the murder plot by allowing the hit-team members to stay with her and store their weapons at her Kendall townhouse.

Davis said Ramirez also tried to ensnare Gonzalez and his brother, Humberto, so the hit men could kill them. And, she provided the getaway car on the day of their murders, he said.

“Ramirez knew the hit team members targeted Bernardo Gonzalez because he was a government witness,” Davis said, asserting that at one point she even “volunteered to commit the murder herself.”