The Superior Court of Justice of Andalusia (TSJA) has confirmed the sentences of 20 years and one day in prison for B.N.A.A. for commissioning D.V.G., who was sentenced to 16 years in prison, with the murder of her husband on August 13, 2021 in exchange for 1,000 euros, taking advantage of the fact that he was alone in his ‘Los Cabecicos’ farmhouse in Huércal-Overa (Almería ), where his body later appeared with more than thirty stab wounds.
The Andalusian high court rejects the appeals raised by the defenses aimed at revoking the decision adopted by a jury court in the Provincial Court of Almería without them requesting the annulment of the verdict or the oral trial, according to the ruling.
The Chamber points out that there is sufficient circumstantial evidence for the conviction of the accused, since the evidence that they planned and executed the crime is based on objective evidence, since the assessment made by the jury is presented as valid in light of the arguments given. for the defenses in their resources.
Thus, in the case of the woman, the court supports the arguments given by the jury to justify that the woman commissioned the death of her husband based not only on the acts prior to the crime but also on the subsequent events, since both defendants They were in permanent telephone contact.
With this, they warn that, if the accused had told her that he killed her husband due to some unforeseen circumstance, she could have declared this in court, “which could have provided support for a reasonable doubt. But that was not the case.” .
In the same way, it invalidates the possibility of applying the mitigating circumstance of confession in her sentence due to the fact that she went to the Civil Guard before being investigated to state that she had ordered her husband to be “taught” when she suspected that he was going to leave her to leave with another woman who, according to his belief, was his own daughter.
“He offered a version that was largely exculpatory (he sought to give a fright or a lesson, but not death). And secondly, there is no persistence in the confession, since what was expressed in the plenary session is even further from being truthful, by reducing the assignment to a conversation to convince, without mentioning the purpose of ‘scare’ or ‘teasing’, which would denote at least physical aggression,” he summarizes.
In relation to the hitman, he also rejects the arguments offered by his defense, understanding that the evidence demonstrated shows that an attack occurred on the victim in the farmhouse that ended his life. “The defense strategy was not based on the moment of the attack, but rather focused on the fact that there was no attack and that the victim was alive and unharmed when the accused left the farmhouse. That was what the Jury had to decide” , determines the court.
The defendants were convicted of the crime of murder in which, in the case of the woman, the aggravating circumstance of kinship occurs. The ruling of the TSJA may be appealed to the Supreme Court.
The jury considered it proven after the trial that the woman commissioned the family friend to murder her husband, with whom the relationship had cooled over the years, after suspecting that he intended to divorce her to get married. with another person, according to the accused, with one of her daughters from a previous relationship.
Thus, the day before the crime, around 3:00 p.m., the woman met with a hitman whom she proposed to end her husband’s life in exchange for 1,000 euros, which he accepted. Likewise, both of them specified the modus operandi the next day while the convicted woman’s husband was at her farm. In this sense, the sentence states that planning “the intention to give him a lesson consisting of killing him or at least representing such a possibility.”
To ensure that the victim was alone in the farmhouse, the accused made a call, subsequently notifying the hitman that he had a free way to go to the property. The reports on the position of the mobile phones, the call log and the images captured by the traffic cameras were decisive for the jury when issuing her verdict.
Thus, around 1:15 p.m. on that same August 13, the accused went in accordance with the agreement in search of his friend’s husband, whom he “pounced on with the intention of causing his death,” for which he stabbed multiple stab wounds with a knife about 12 centimeters long in the chest, right thigh, arms, right hand, head and back.
The wounds caused the death of the man in a short time due to the “violence” of the attack, who suffered two of the stab wounds in the chest, which necessarily caused his death from hypovolemic shock. Along these lines, they rejected the thesis that the man was only trying to “injure” the victim to “scare” her, as the woman maintained during the trial.
Starting from this initial intention to kill the man and the recognition that the payment of 1,000 euros was agreed upon although it was later alleged that it was “for gasoline”, it is also considered proven that a crime of planned and cheap murder occurred.
The original sentence also includes the absence of mitigating circumstances despite the fact that the woman went 19 days after the crime to confess the facts before the Civil Guard given that, by then, the investigators had already tightened their grip on the family.
Likewise, in her statement the woman omitted to talk about the telephone that she kept hidden and with which she contacted the hitman “with the purpose of evading her criminal responsibility.” “She stopped collaborating with the justice system, making investigation tasks difficult,” she points out in her statement.
The verdict also rejected the mitigating circumstance of psychological anomaly regarding the woman as there was not a mental alteration with sufficient force that could mitigate her criminal responsibility. The existence of immediate external stimuli that caused the accused to become “obstinate” and lead her to commit the acts was also rejected.
