The Superior Court of Justice of Castilla-La Mancha amended this week the Jury Court that returned a guilty verdict for homicide against Pepe Lomas, the 81-year-old bookseller from Ciudad Real who shot and killed a thief he found in the patio of his home in the early hours of August 1, 2021 carrying a chainsaw. Also to the Provincial Court, which did not recognize his legitimate defense to lower the six-year prison sentence imposed by two degrees. He also corrected the Prosecutor’s Office who, at the trial, considered that the convicted man could have used more proportionate means than firing his hunting shotgun at the assailant, who had just been released from prison for robberies.
Magistrates Vicente Rouco, Jesús Martínez-Escribano and Rosario Sánchez Chacón issued a sentence, known on Tuesday, in which they reduced the sentence from six years to nine months – the time that Lomas spent in preventive detention, so he will not have to return. to a cell. They thus closed the debate on self-defense opened again with the case. When it came to trial last April, 20,000 people asked for Lomas’ pardon on Change.orgowner of the Aspa bookstore in the Plaza Mayor of Ciudad Real, next to the most famous tapas bars in the capital of La Mancha, where he worked for decades, oblivious to the hustle and bustle, listening to classical music and giving few words to those who came there, as they remember him. their neighbors.
The sentence also recognizes evidence that was not “adequately evaluated by the jury”: the report presented by Dr. José Carlos Fuertes and the psychologist Ana Gutiérrez Salegui on the paranoid-schizoid disorder (paranoia) that the elderly man has suffered for at least at least 27 years old and that made him live obsessed that someone would enter his chalet. This is demonstrated by the existence of a multitude of letters that he sent to the Police and the Civil Guard between 1997 and 2019 – to which ABC has had access – in which it is clear that he was convinced that someone was loitering on his Atalaya property (a forest park on the outskirts of the city). As also stated in the Superior Court ruling, he had “all the windows of his home boarded up” when he was arrested, after he himself notified the security forces to say that he had shot an individual who turned out to be Nelson David Ramírez Carrasco. , a 38-year-old Honduran with a criminal record.
“It must be evaluated that the type of paranoid disorder of the accused refers precisely to his perception of being the object of acts of persecution,” reads the ruling after the appeal of his lawyer, Juan Manuel Lumbreras.
He also wrote to Seprona
«For approximately twenty years, I have been enduring acts of vandalism against the house, the irrigation installation and the trees without this situation having been resolved to date (…) I already had an interview with you on the 8th and you referred me to the National Police where I was assisted and I filed the corresponding complaint, but I understand these actions as an ecological crime,” he addressed Seprona in 2013 in a handwritten letter. «List of stolen objects: a copper skimmer, about 20 centimeters in diameter. Another skimmer, made of the same material and handle, about 12 centimeters in diameter, two copper braziers, a paddle…,” reads another of the 1998 complaints to the Police.
At dawn on August 1, 2021, at two o’clock, Pepe Lomas’s predictions materialized. He woke up, had breakfast and left the house to check the irrigation of the farm. He saw that the control box was “destroyed” and a knot in some strip curtains that he had not made. He went back into his bedroom and took the 12-gauge Víctor Sarasqueta shotgun that he had there and was loaded with two cartridges. He went to the corral next to the entrance gate of the property and near the tool room, he saw a person with a chainsaw (which he had taken from the same tool shed in the house). He approached him and at a distance of between five and ten meters he discharged the two cartridges from the shotgun, causing wounds to his chest that would prove fatal. He went back into his bedroom, loaded the shotgun again and when he came out he shot the man again, although this last time without any harm. It is the account of events that the popular jury accepted by seven votes to two.
The jury did not declare the defense (neither complete nor incomplete) of self-defense proven, but the Superior Court did appreciate it and concluded: “It is not possible to fail to recognize a defensive purpose in someone who is surprised by an illegitimate intrusion in his own home.” of clear criminal content (…) In the middle of the night, at dawn, in a place far away and isolated from larger population centers, and where the resident cannot immediately receive help from third parties and therefore from the forces and security forces. Also due to the incomplete defense of mental disorder and the mitigating defense of highly qualified confession, the Civil and Criminal Chamber finally reduced the sentence from six years and three months to nine months and four days.
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