It is very rare for the Criminal Appeals Chamber of the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) to modify the sentence of a jury procedure. But this time he has done so in response to the appeal presented by the family, specifically the daughter of Pedro Fernández López, who on July 10, 2021 was savagely murdered while he was sleeping in the house of his partner, Dolores Vázquez. The crime occurred in Sabadell and had no impact until the investigation came to light when the videos recorded by one of the residents of the property through the peephole showed the perpetrator of the crime, Isaac Gil González, beating, kicking and stepping over the victim’s lifeless body. A popular jury found the two twin sisters, Dolores and Pilar, and Isaac, the latter’s romantic partner, guilty. And the court sentenced the first to 20 years, the other to 16 and the perpetrator to 17. Some sentences have now been corrected and increased to 23 years for Dolores, 20 for Pilar and another 20 for Isaac.
The sentence, announced this Tuesday, has brought relief to the victim’s ex-wife and daughter. “It is not the 25 years that we requested for the three, but, at least, it is a much more reasonable sentence and clears up the shadow of the victim’s mistreatment of Dolores that never existed,” he explained in a telephone conversation with La Vanguardia. lawyer for Pedro’s family, Juan Pagán.
And it is precisely some “possible mistreatment” of the victim who was his partner, Dolores, that was used by the president of the court to reduce the sentence of the three convicts. The magistrate himself admitted that mistreatment had not been proven, but even so, he accepted it as a possible motive for the crime.
The Appeals Chamber is forceful in the new ruling. “Pedro’s death is especially painful for his daughter and his family, but even more so is the grief suggesting that he is an abuser.” And the rapporteur magistrate, María Jesús Manzano, reproaches that there had been an attempt to tarnish the image and reputation of the victim by showing him as an abuser when, in reality, Pedro was a “kind, affectionate and well-known and loved person in his city, Sabadell.” ”.
In the same appeal hearing, Dolores Vázquez’s lawyer, the lawyer Mireia Gómez, made an impeccable defense of her client’s innocence, saying that she had been convicted without any evidence other than a voice recording between her sister Pilar and Isaac, in which she was not even named. It was an audio in which Pilar warned her partner that her Friday “could not happen” and that her sister agreed. Furthermore, he disagreed with the aggravating circumstance of kinship that was applied to his client by ensuring that the relationship between Pedro and Dolores was one of comings and goings, in which the comings and goings were longer than the comings, and that they did not live in the same roof and lacked a common life project. “An unstable union based exclusively on the reciprocal consumption of antidepressants and alcohol.”
However, the court rejects the appeal. He defends the abundant jurisprudence on the application of the aggravating circumstance of kinship in couples of instability similar to that of Dolores and the victim and considers as more than motivated the knowledge that the convicted woman had of the plans of her sister and Isaac to end the life of His couple. The court understands that the woman did nothing to prevent the crime, which was committed when the man was sleeping in her bed. She didn’t do anything before, during, or after. And not only that, the court cites, several neighbors saw the two women and Isaac trying to clean the stairs to which the victim tried to flee, pursued by his murderer with a metal bar.
