The Civil and Criminal Chamber of the Superior Court of Justice (TSJ) has acquitted a young man despite the fact that he admitted in the trial to having sexually abused his 11-year-old sister. The court, in a recent ruling, upholds the appeal raised by the defendant’s defense and overturns the four-year prison sentence imposed by the Court. That resolution also included a restraining order and communication with the victim – currently 13 years old – and a measure of supervised release for five years, which are now annulled when the sentence is revoked.
Last May, the Court sentenced this twenty-year-old for the touching he carried out in the genital area of his sister, aged 11, between May 2020 and 2021. The resolution recognized that it had not been possible to prove how many times these occurred. abuses that, in any case, were carried out taking advantage of the fact that their parents were not at home.
This case already generated some disparity in the Court among the magistrates themselves, who condemned the young man by two votes to one. The dissenting vote was that of the president of the Second Section, Judge Augusto Morales, who understood that the accused should be acquitted because the facts had not been duly proven in the trial despite his confession.
«Legal insufficiency»
After the accused recognized the facts and the sentence imposed by the Court, the young man’s defense filed an appeal. In it, the lawyer argued the “legal insufficiency” of the evidence used to support the conviction, which was based solely on the confession of his client. This party stressed that there was no external peripheral corroboration to support this conviction and demanded its annulment. The TSJ now aligns itself with the thesis of the defense and the dissenting opinion of Judge Morales by understanding that “the constitutional presumption of innocence has not been distorted due to the impossibility of granting incriminating validity to the personal statement of the accused.”
The court emphasizes that the contrast between the statements given by the defendant throughout the procedure “evidence a very low epistemological quality in view of the inconsistency, the erraticism, the lack of persistence, the absence of a precise and minimally contextualized and with specific temporal and spatial coordinates. There is still an appeal against this resolution.
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