Joaquín E. S., a 58-year-old farmer from La Fueva (province of Huesca) who on Wednesday admitted before the Provincial Court of Huesca to having sexually abused five girls around him for more than ten years, will pay for his crimes with a 6-year sentence. of prison and a restraining order from the province of at least 10 years.
In the second and final session of the trial held this Thursday, both the prosecution and the two private accusations, who initially requested 30 years in prison, agreed to reduce that initial request to include a highly qualified mitigating circumstance of reparation for the damage caused after the accused has deposited 146,000 euros in court to pay compensation.
According to the defense lawyer, this amount exceeds the compensation for consequences requested by the private accusations in order to also seek reparation for the moral damages caused and responds to the criteria of the bill to reform the Criminal Procedure Law in the interest of “restorative justice” not based solely on the imposition of heavy sentences.
In the first session, the accused already admitted to having kissed and sexually touched the minors, some as young as 5 years old, when he invited them to go for a ride on his tractor or to go see wild boars on summer nights, facts that Three of the abused young women corroborated behind closed doors that day.
This Thursday, the hearing resumed with the statements of the two remaining victims. Immediately afterwards, the psychologists from the Institute of Legal Medicine of Aragon intervened. According to their testimonies, the experience lived by the minors, some of them with threats towards their parents if they told what happened, caused them to have post-traumatic stress disorder with serious emotional consequences that still remain and that will condition their personal and professional development.
This testimony has been corroborated by the forensic doctors, who have stated that they did not see any signs of manipulation or seeking to benefit from the situation in the victims, but rather a persistent, credible and truthful account of the situations they experienced.
The prosecutor has justified the reduction from the initial 30 years to 6 years and 15 days when the compensation was recorded, since the reparation of the damage is a highly qualified mitigating circumstance that reduces the sentence by two degrees. Added to that penalty is the requested restraining order so that the accused cannot enter or reside in the province of Huesca.
For his part, the lawyer for three of the minors, Javier Osés, has expressed his clients’ desire not to undergo a long process that forces them to recount in detail the abuses they experienced when they were children. Furthermore, the lawyer has assessed that the man must serve “a minimum” of 4 years in prison – he was already in provisional prison for 5 months – and placed emphasis on the penalty of removal, on which the young women insisted due to the fear of to be able to meet their attacker again at some point in their lives.
However, the duration of this restraining order remains to be clarified. The lawyer Osés understands that the five sentences of 10 years will be added for each minor (50 years in total), which in practice would mean a banishment for life. The defense lawyer does not see it that way, who estimates the sentence at 10 years in total and refers to what the Court says in the execution of the sentence.
