Charles A. Pittman is the most peculiar of all those arrested for the protests against the sentence of the you process that shook Barcelona in October 2019. Shortly before noon on the 18th, this 30-year-old American living in Barcelona approached the Plaza de Catalunya, where a demonstration was being held – at that time massive and without incident – in favor of the independence leaders convicted by the Supreme Court. Pittman went to a waste container and shoved half the body into it. The prosecution maintains that he burned some rolls of toilet paper with the intention of “burning it completely.” He defended this Tuesday, in the trial, that he was only looking for materials to recycle – one of his daily occupations – and that he was not even aware of the Catalan political reality.
Pittman left a stable life in the United States and settled four years ago in Barcelona, where his brother lives. It is his only roots. He has no known work or address. Sleep where you can. He is a nomad. The man, who sports striking blonde dreadlocks, arrived at the City of Justice with an absent-minded air and took his seat, lost in thought, until the oral hearing began. “I was not doing anything but recycling. I have not burned anything. There were a lot of people and I was passing by, but I didn’t even know why they were protesting ”, he told the judge with the help of an English interpreter.
The policemen reported that, although they did not see Pittman with the lighter in his hand, they did observe that smoke was coming out of the waste container (flames, an agent qualified). The outbreak of fire was quickly extinguished and the container suffered little damage, which the accusation estimates at 489 euros. The defense insists that Pittman didn’t set anything on fire and was just in the wrong place and time. The agents assured that they identified him by his clothes and by his appearance and that they detained him when he was already half his body inside the receptacle.
The prosecution maintained at the end of the trial the initial accusation, a sign of the heavy hand with which it is treating the causes related to the serious incidents that occurred as a result of the sentence that sentenced the leaders of the you process, with former Vice President Oriol Junqueras at the helm. The week of protests in the main Catalan cities resulted in some 600 injured, more than a hundred detainees – 28, including Pittman, were placed in provisional prison – and damages that exceeded 2.5 million euros.
Pittman faces a request for six years in prison for two crimes (public disorder and damage to a property for public use) that, in reality, respond to the sole fact of trying to burn a container without success. The prosecution emphasizes as evidence that the police found seven lighters, a bottle of orange paint, a “paint-stained template with the figure of a fox” and some sheets with annotations in the American’s pants and fanny pack.
If convicted, Pittman may have to return to the United States. The prosecution has asked that he serve two-thirds of the sentence and, later, be expelled from Spain, where he could not return in the next eight years. The other risk, that of prison, this unlikely protagonist of the you process You already know: the head of the examining court number 30 in Barcelona kept him in preventive detention for five months for the incident involving the container. He left at the end of March 2020, in a state of alarm over the pandemic, to a changed world.
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