The expression ‘being a scapegoat’ comes from the times of religious wars in the Middle Ages and refers to “a person to whom all blame is attributed to exempt others”, according to the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy ( RAE). As the Turks were enemies of the Christians, when the latter killed an opponent they placed his head on the point of a spear, and the victim became a macabre trophy, guilty of all the evils caused by others during the Crusades.
In today’s times it is not necessary to kill a person to make him a scapegoat. Just arrest her and send her to prison for a crime she didn’t commit. This is what they did with Claudio Alba, Dolores Vázquez and Ahmed Tommouhi, among other innocent people imprisoned for police and judicial errors.
The truck driver Claudio Alba spent five months in prison, between January 20 and June 17, 1997, after being accused of three of the crimes committed by Joaquín Ferrándiz Ventura, the perpetrator of five murders of women in the province of Castellón.
A month after Claudio’s arrest, a farmer found the body of Amelia Sandra on a raft in Onda. The young woman had been strangled like the other victims, but investigators did not connect the cases.
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From jail, the trucker insisted on his innocence, but only his children and some friends believed him. While Claudio wept behind bars for the police error, Ferrándiz read in the press that the crimes of the three prostitutes already had a culprit, and perhaps that is why he stopped strangling women for a while. He knew that if he continued to kill, with Claudio in prison as the main suspect, the Police could open another line of investigation and search for the real serial killer.
The same day that the trucker entered jail, prosecutor Jesús Alaña acknowledged that there was no conclusive evidence to incriminate him. The hell he lived in prison and the social lynching prolonged Claudio’s suffering until the summer of 1998, when the Civil Guard arrested the real culprit.
Eight years later, the Supreme Court set compensation at 30,050 euros for a deceased man whose presumption of innocence was blown up by a police investigation without evidence.
The Whanninkhoff case
Dolores Vázquez was sentenced in a double trial by a court and the media. In the year 2000 she was arrested by the Civil Guard as the only suspect in the murder of Rocío Whanninkhof, a 19-year-old girl from Malaga. After being sentenced to 15 years in prison, Vázquez spent 15 months behind bars despite the fact that she was finally proven innocent.
The so-called Wanninkhof case is marked by the role of the media, which pointed to her as guilty from the outset. The Prosecutor’s Office maintained in the trial that Vázquez, hurt after the breakup of a sentimental relationship with Alicia Hornos (the young woman’s mother), would have stabbed to death the daughter of her ex-partner. The popular jury accepted this version as valid and sentenced the defendant to 15 years in prison.
But the defendant was acquitted for lack of evidence in a second trial, and was released after more than 500 days behind bars. Her innocence was finally proven after the confession of Tony Alexander King, a British man who admitted having killed Rocío and another young woman from the area of Málaga where she lived.
Injustice with Toummouhi
Ahmed Toummouhi has been sailing for the last few years like a dark whirlwind to nowhere. In 1991 he was charged with a savage string of rapes committed by another man, sentenced to 15 years behind bars and in 2006 he was released after serving three quarters of his sentence. The Civil Guard and the Prosecutor’s Office, which unsuccessfully requested his release, were convinced of his innocence almost from the beginning, but the Supreme Court did not give up on him until June 29.
The Criminal Chamber annulled the judgment of the Court of Barcelona, of September 1992, which sentenced Ahmed (72-year-old Berber from Nador, father of three children and grandfather of six grandchildren) to 24 years in prison for two counts of rape and two counts of injury.
The high court upheld the appeal for review against the final sentence, which focused on new evidence such as expert reports on the semen found in an intimate garment of one of the assaulted women, and which did not correspond to the genetic markers of the recurrent.
These analyzes to compare the DNA, as stated by the defendant in his appeal, were carried out in 1992 by the Scientific Police of Barcelona but they never came to the attention of the court, despite being an admitted piece of evidence that formed part of the procedure, given that the experts did not They went to testify at the oral hearing and the Barcelona Court did not suspend the trial for their summons.
The victim’s testimony was “the only evidence taken into consideration by the Provincial Court” of Barcelona for the conviction. However, the young woman later acknowledged in an interview her grave mistake in identifying Ahmed as the man who raped her. Quadruple error by the Police, the victim, the experts and the guarantor court itself in theory of the procedure.
After so much mistake, the big question arises: how many more scapegoats have gone to jail? As the British jurist William Blackstone (1723, London – 1780, Wallingford) said, it is better for ten guilty people to escape than for one innocent to suffer.
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