First conviction of a prison officer for threatening an inmate defender in X

First conviction in Catalonia of a prison official for threatening Iñaki Rivera, one of the greatest defenders of the rights of inmates in the community. A Barcelona magistrate has sentenced the official to a fine of 180 euros for a minor crime of threats, who through X told the jurist: “If one day I find you on the street, run away.”

In her ruling, to which elDiario.es has had access, Judge Myriam Linage concludes that the threat caused “deep discomfort and anguish” to Rivera. The judge gives full credibility to the jurist’s statement and highlights that Rivera explained that the message was “the last piece of a set of hostile attitudes” received by prison officials “for a long time and never before reported.”

“Beyond the personal assessment, I trust that this sentence will serve to put an end to the campaigns of some officials and prison unions against the people who defend the rights of people deprived of liberty,” said Rivera, defended by lawyer David Aranda, after learning of the ruling.

The message now condemned by Justice represented a new chapter in the accusation against Rivera who, for years, has been a part of prison officials for his work in supervising penitentiary activity. The UB professor is in charge of the Observatory of the Penal System and Human Rights, an institution that monitors complaints from prisoners for alleged mistreatment by officials.

The conflict on the part of the group against Rivera began 20 years ago, when the Observatory was the first entity that interviewed the inmates of the Brians prison who reported beatings by officials in a riot. More recently, CCOO even denounced an intervention by the professor in a TV3 program in which he stated during a debate on penitentiary isolation that in Catalan prisons “there is torture, there is mistreatment and there is humiliation” by officials towards inmates. , in a case that ended up archived.

In her ruling, the judge emphasizes that this past hostility of the group of officials against Rivera “represented a coercive plus” in the message from X of the convicted employee, which caused “a rational fear” in the jurist.

The official’s tweet occurred during the last prison crisis last year. The murder at the hands of an inmate of a cook at the Mas d’Enric prison (Tarragona) led to a blockade of the penitentiary centers by prison officials, who prevented the entry and exit of inmates, family members and prison workers without summoning formally a strike.

Like several members of the legal profession and the judiciary, the Observatory chaired by Rivera denounced through the social network X that the prison blockade violated the rights of inmates and affected their mental health.

The official’s response to the Observatory’s message was a threat that has now been condemned by Justice: “Iñaki, son of the great chirusa, if one day I find you on the street, run away, because I will not have any kind of contemplation towards your fucking person, gil Shit, you won’t group me up, you shitty bastard. [sic]”“.

The fact that it was written in Argentine Spanish, Rivera’s country of origin, denoted “particular knowledge” of the jurist by the official, which “increased his personal anxiety and discomfort,” the ruling highlights.

In his statement at the trial, the official, defended by a former prison worker accused in 1998 of injuries to inmates and who today practices as a lawyer, argued that, although the message did come from his X profile, he noted because it could have been written by someone else with access to your account. This allegation is an “excuse that lacks plausibility,” the judge decides, since the accused did not indicate who could have written the message.

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