The Civil and Criminal Chamber of the Superior Court of Justice of the Valencian Community (TSJCV) has confirmed the sentence of 22 and a half years in prison imposed on a man who murdered his girlfriend while she was sleeping in his home, located in the city ??of Valencia, during the early hours of December 3, 2021.
The Chamber thus ratifies the sentence handed down by the Second Section of the Provincial Court of Valencia on June 6, after a popular jury issued a guilty verdict for the prisoner.
That ruling declared him the author of a crime of murder with the concurrence of the aggravating circumstance of gender and imposed on him the payment of compensation of 77,777 euros for the victim’s mother and 22,222 euros for the sister for moral damages, compensation that They are also maintained now.
The defense of the convicted person appealed that sentence and asked the TSJCV to revoke it to assess in his conduct the incomplete defense of transitory mental disorder or, alternatively, the mitigation of obstinacy, among other allegations.
However, the Civil and Criminal Chamber of the Autonomous High Court has rejected these claims, considering that there is no evidentiary error in the appealed sentence, nor any violation of law or constitutional precept.
According to the magistrates, the jury’s decision to declare that the convicted man had his mental faculties intact at the time of committing the acts was based on “abundant and detailed psychological-psychiatric expert information” during the trial, so “it is not revealed arbitrary or unjustified.”
Regarding the cruelty, appreciated by the Court in accordance with the jury’s verdict and which the convicted person also challenged, the TSJCV points out that the proven facts reveal on his part a conduct and voluntariness of causing “unnecessary and inhumane” damage for what “such a high number of harmful acts is unnecessary to cause death.”
Finally, the Chamber considers equally appropriate the application of the gender aggravating circumstance included in the appealed sentence after declaring proven that the death of the young woman constituted an act of gender violence “within the violence suffered by women for the fact of being women.” ”.
Since September 2021, the convicted man and the victim had a romantic relationship without cohabitation, in which she occasionally spent the night at his house.
According to the facts declared proven by the popular jury and reflected in the ruling of the Provincial Court, during the early hours of December 3 of that year, the man, who thought that his girlfriend would leave him, decided that the girl had to die if she did not want to. to be with him.
In this way, he attacked her when she was sleeping and hit her severely with a stone on the head and face. The victim was stunned as a result of the blows, which the prisoner took advantage of to later stab her multiple times with two knives and scissors in a “merciless, cruel and inhumane” manner, with the intention of, in addition to killing her, causing her unnecessary suffering. .
He then suffocated her with the belt of a dressing gown that he placed around her neck to ensure her death. The woman died, bleeding to death from stab wounds and asphyxiated by the compression of her belt. The appeal ruling issued by the TSJCV can in turn be appealed in cassation before the Supreme Court.
