It was in January 2018 when Écija, a municipality in the province of Seville, became the scene of a complicated police chase. Several officers were trying to stop an SUV that was speeding through the town and was being driven by a man who had been accused of raping his own daughter. After several attacks, the police vehicle broke down, an accident that the suspect took advantage of to run over one of the National Police agents.
The facts have already been assessed by the Criminal Court number 8 of Seville, which sentenced the man to three years in prison for committing the crime of attacking authority, although the victim filed an appeal requesting that the contemplate the convicted person’s “serious addiction to narcotic substances” as a mitigating circumstance. Finally, his allegations have not been taken into account and the Court confirms the previous ruling.
Specifically, the court declared it proven that on the afternoon of January 2, 2018, the accused, “who was being sought by agents of the National Police for the alleged commission of a crime of sexual assault against his daughter, was located when he was traveling with an all-terrain vehicle along the railway avenue in the town of Écija”.
The account of proven facts specifies that although the officers stopped him, the accused did not stop his march and began “a rapid escape, being pursued by the police vehicle, which had to carry out several evasive maneuvers to avoid their attacks, at the height of kilometer 2,000 of the highway towards Cañada Rosal, in the municipality of Écija”.
Furthermore, as the court declared, “because the police vehicle broke down and its officers were getting out of it, the defendant passed by the place where the officers were, who, while properly uniformed, ordered him to stop the vehicle, at which point that the defendant directed the vehicle he was driving towards the agents.”
Thus, and according to the initial sentencing sentence, the accused ran over one of the agents, who “had to fire three shots aimed at the wheels of the all-terrain vehicle to try to stop it, failing at that time and continuing to flee,” after having caused the agent in question injuries such as a right rib contusion and post-traumatic tendonitis, among others.
The appeal addressed by the First Section of the Court of Seville was formulated precisely by the affected agent, alleging “an inappropriate application of the mitigating circumstance of serious addiction to narcotic substances” and claiming not to apply such mitigating circumstance, so that consequently the sentence was four years and six months in prison for the crime of attack with the aggravating circumstance of recidivism and a sentence of two months of fine with a daily fee of six euros for the minor crime of injuries.
But the Court warns that the Criminal Procedure Law determines that “the appeal sentence may not (…) aggravate the conviction that had been imposed by error in the appreciation of the evidence in the terms provided in the third paragraph of the article 790.2”.
“It is not possible that in this appeal, through a new evaluation of the evidence and through exclusively legal criteria, the assessment of the mitigating circumstance can be revoked. Issuing a ruling in this sense would imply carrying out a weighing of the set of evidence presented at trial, and of the inferences that could be drawn, to then nullify the probative value considered by the magistrate a quo of evidence not produced before this court”, the Court states, stating that “neither any evidence has been taken in this appeal, nor in the effects of revoking the assessment of the mitigating circumstance, the appellant has been interested in annulment as required by the constitutional doctrine reviewed”.
For this reason, the First Section of the Seville Court completely rejects the agent’s sentence and fully confirms the conviction in its initial terms.
