Barcelona City Council has spent 14,520 euros paying lawyers from a large private firm to represent seven victims of robberies in the city allegedly committed by repeat thieves. This is a pilot plan initiated by the council last August and is expected to last until the end of the year.
The measure focuses only on property crimes (theft or robbery), which are the most common in Barcelona. However, it leaves out the most serious types of crimes, such as sexual assaults. The City Council of the Catalan capital, as a public administration, does not have legal legitimacy to appear in a robbery case, so the council signed a contract of less than 14,520 euros with the Molins law firm so that lawyers from this firm could represent the victims as private accusation.
The plan is hardly unprecedented and has generated debate in various sectors of the Barcelona legal profession due to the distinction between crimes and the fact that a public administration has entrusted legal assistance to defend private victims to a private office. The Molins firm has been winning contracts for years and under administrations of different political colors to defend agents of the Guàrdia Urbana and Barcelona Firefighters.
A municipal spokesperson defends the plan because she wants to focus “on the phenomenon of multiple recidivism in property crimes” as it is the most common type of crime in Barcelona. Thefts without violence represent around half of the crimes committed in the Catalan capital.
On all occasions in which the private lawyer paid by the City Council has intervened after the thief’s arrest, he has requested precautionary measures. The judges have agreed to the provisional detention of the arrested person in four of the seven cases. The council has declined to specify how many times the Prosecutor’s Office had already requested provisional detention in addition to the private lawyer.
The measure is part of the concern that Barcelona City Council has shown for repeat thieves, and that led the council to support toughening the punishment for cell phone thefts, despite being a measure rejected by the progressive sectors of the judiciary. and the legal profession.
Yes, an alignment has been achieved between administrations to pick up the gauntlet to the main demand of the judiciary: Government, Generalitat and City Council presented at the beginning of December the reinforcement of criminal courts to judge thefts and robberies, a type of hearings that should be held quickly , but in Barcelona there were delays of around a year.
Asked about the criteria to decide in which cases the lawyer is offered to pay for victims, the City Council details four requirements depending on the crime, the victim and the detainee.
On the one hand, the alleged perpetrator must be a “multiple offender,” that is, he must have accumulated three or more final sentences in the same type of crime. The criteria are also limited to the crimes of less serious theft, robbery with violence or vehicle robbery. This implies that the rest of the criminal types that occur in the city are left out of the legal assistance paid by the City Council.
Finally, it is also necessary that the victim be a person of legal age and resident in Spain so that they can be available to the court when required throughout the procedure. This prevents, for example, the tourist who suffers a robbery from giving up continuing with the case once he has returned to his country.
Until mid-December, the pilot plan had served seven victims of robberies and thefts of seven objects: two mobile phones worth 900 and 1,100 euros respectively; computer equipment in a backpack worth a total of 1,880 euros; a watch and a mobile phone worth 6,700 euros; two gold chains of 1,500 euros; a handbag worth 1,100 euros and another gold chain worth 1,000 euros. All amounts are those declared by the victims and are awaiting expert ratification as the investigation of the cases progresses.
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