The Supreme Court has confirmed the sentence to pay a fine of 6,480 euros to the doctor Jesús Candel “Spiriman” for two continued crimes of insulting the former Andalusian president Susana Díaz and the former Deputy Minister of Health Martín Blanco for expressions against them in YouTube videos, Facebook and Twitter.
The Criminal Chamber, as reported by the court in a statement this Friday, thus dismisses the appeal that Candel filed against the sentence of the Granada Court, which has already confirmed the one issued earlier by the Criminal Court 6 .
Specifically, he was sentenced for each of the crimes to a 12-month fine at the rate of a daily quota of 9 euros (a total of 3,240 euros for each crime), as well as the payment of compensation of 5,000 euros to the former president and former vice-counselor.
In addition, the confirmed sentence ordered the removal of the videos from the YouTube channel and from the social networks Facebook and Twitter when the sentence was final.
The Supreme Court affirms that the appellant, one of the promoters of the health mobilizations in Granada, is wrong in arguing that the “animus injuriandi” (intention to cause an attack on the dignity of others) has not been proven, alleging that the expressions on the that the sentence is based on have been taken out of context, as well as that the appellant is a political activist who has been very critical of the health management of the then president of the Board and her deputy counselor.
In this case, the high court considers that the expressions made in the videos that the doctor posted on social networks, “as much as the defense tries to degrade its value by emphasizing its vindictive dimension”, have no protection in the legitimate exercise of freedom. expression.
In his sentence, a speech by the president of the Second Chamber, Manuel Marchena, recalls that one of the most classic writers on criminal law stated that “the essence of the crime of libel is not in the shell of the words but in the intention of the person who utters.”
In this sense, it affirms that this is the only way to explain that when defining the limits of the typicity of the crime punished in article 208 of the Criminal Code, the same expression can be interpreted, in a certain context, as a colloquial interjection located outside the walls of the criminal law and that same word, already in another environment, can be valued as the sharp instrument to laminate the honorability of a third party.
This idea, points out the Chamber, allows rejecting a good part of the arguments of the defense of “Spiriman” that underlines the innocuous nature of the expressions used by the appellant.
According to the Supreme Court, some of the words used by the accused, in connection with other expressions of the videos that were used as a vehicle for the dissemination of messages critical of the government’s work on networks, “prevent relativizing their scope to what they could be considered colloquial expressions or expressions typical of a singular way of speaking”.
He adds that, with the words exposed, it is impossible to question that the purpose that encouraged the dissemination of these messages was none other than “to erode in the most intense way possible the honorability of the complainants.”
Therefore, it concludes that none of the epithets used, in the context in which they were pronounced, can be considered protected by the constitutional text.
And he adds that the system of freedoms does not grant protection to expressions such as those used by the accused in the context in which they were used.
“In the weighing judgment that the Chamber has to verify between the right to honor of the complainants and the right to spread a critical, acid, even hurtful message towards the public officials who are the recipients of these imprecations, we grant precedence to the first of those rights in conflict “, he indicated.
