The director of the Infobierzo website has been convicted by the Provincial Court of León as the author criminally responsible for a minor crime of threats for insulting and threatening to kill a journalist.
Diego Fernández had been sentenced on September 11 in the first instance by the Investigative Court number 3 of León to payment of a one-month fine and payment of procedural costs. The person in charge of the digital presented an appeal that has just been overturned by the judge of the Court José Luis Chamorro, who ratifies a sentence against which there is no longer any appeal.
Interview with Raquel Díaz
The events that are the subject of the criminal accusation occurred when the person responsible for the aforementioned local digital used as his own the exclusive interview that this newspaper published on April 2, 2023 with the Leonese lawyer. Raquel Díaz, victim of a brutal attack in May 2020 by the former Bierzo politician Pedro Muñoz, sentenced in two instances to 16 years and 11 months for trying to kill her and several other crimes (he is waiting in prison for the resolution of the appeals to the Supreme Court).
The interviewee, paraplegic and with irreversible neurological damage, broke three years of silence to tell of his ordeal of violence alongside the once powerful Bercian chieftain. (Raquel Díaz: “I just wanted it to end, for him to kill me once and for all”).
“I’ll kill you, motherfucker, I’ll kill you”
The interview and photographs were carried out for this newspaper by the freelance journalist Susana Martín who, when the person responsible for Infobierzo was shamed for the illegal use of his material, received the insults and death threats that the sentence includes as proven facts. «I’ll kill you, motherfucker, I’ll kill you. I’m going to go get you. “You are the shame of the profession.”.
Regarding the threats made by Fernández, who in his appeal considered that “they have no criminal relevance because they are not intimidating”, ruling 484/24 of the Provincial Court of León warns Diego Fernández that «yes they are capable of frighteningnot only to the complainant but to any person, since they are perfectly suitable to deprive of tranquility and peace, without it being necessary for this purpose of mental disturbance to occur, so that it is enough that what is used is suitable to intimidate the victim. «.
From the ABC editorial office we show full support to our journalist collaborator and we emphasize the unmissable reflection made by the magistrate who wrote the conviction: «In a violent society like the one we live in, where it is not uncommon for the media to inform us of serious and violent events (murders, homicides, assaults, etc. .), cannot be taken lightly as the expression uttered by the appellant where, whoever utters them (consciously), does not seem to have a flattering purpose. In the ruling, the judge reminds the condemned man that he has been given “a generous sentence, the minimum possible.”
A disproportionate and unjustified response
In statements to this newspaper, the complainant’s lawyer, Felipe Patiño, has indicated that the sentence handed down by the Provincial Court of León “only deals with the criminal consequences derived from the disproportionate and unjustified response from the director of Infobierzo to my client’s request to respect his intellectual property rights over the photographs and texts of the first interview with Raquel Díaz, published in ABC”, but he anticipates that this week he will file a lawsuit against Diego Fernández and Infobierzo before the commercial court for the violation of intellectual property rights due to the misuse of the journalist’s material.
In the new judicial action, Patiño will demand compensation from the convicted person and his company “for moral damage and for the economic damage of the illegitimate – and unethical – use of the informative material, under the protection of the Intellectual Property Law.”
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