The Supreme Court (TS) has confirmed the sentence of three years in prison for a man who murdered a third party with metal tweezers to charge the car battery, as a result of a scuffle that arose after the victim came out in defense of a friend who had been reprimanded for urinating near an attraction at the Herencia fair in Ciudad Real.
In a sentence, collected by Europa Press, the Criminal Chamber confirms the conviction for a consummated crime of reckless homicide and dismisses the appeal of the convicted person. Likewise, it ratifies the penalty of a fine for a second implicated who assaulted the victim before the fatal outcome.
The facts, according to the court ruling -issued by the Provincial Court of Ciudad Real-, occurred on the night of February 10, 2018 at the Herencia fairgrounds. It was around 10:00 p.m. when a woman “proceeded to urinate on the public road.” Specifically, she did it between the victim’s car and a fairground attraction.
The event did not go unnoticed by the wife of the owner of said attraction and by the homicide victim. After witnessing it, the first “came to recriminate” the woman for her conduct, “starting up a discussion between them witnessed” by the order of the subsequent attack.
After a few minutes, the woman who had urinated near the attraction returned to the scene with the victim and another friend with the intention of picking up her car and going to dinner elsewhere. Once they got into the vehicle, and after reversing, the victim -whom she was driving- was intercepted by the man convicted of a crime of abuse.
The latter, “annoyed with the previous incident, approached the driver’s window and proceeded to hit” the victim on the face “up to three times.” The uproar did not go unnoticed by various showmen, among whom was the murderer, and who decided to go to see what was happening.
Thus, the man convicted of the homicide, “provided with metal tweezers of the type intended for recharging vehicle batteries, proceeded at his own expense to strike the left temple” of the victim “with the metal tip of the same.” with the intention of injuring him but without recklessly foreseeing that this could cause his death”.
The impact caused the victim to fall unconscious to the ground, at which time his friend came to his “help to prevent him from continuing” by hitting him. The ruling details that the attack caused the victim a trauma that led to massive hemorrhage in both cerebral hemispheres.
Despite the fact that he was transferred to the Herencia Health Center by another friend, the victim died a few hours later.
In its ruling, the Supreme Court rejects, as the murderer’s defense alluded to, that the death could have occurred naturally and not necessarily due to his violent action, as reflected in the report issued by two professors from the University of Santiago de Compostela who maintained that the most probable cause of death could be related to an aneurysm.
“It was the deficient work of the forensics that prevented this circumstance from being verified, to the point that the existence of other data – speed of the SAH, absence of fracture and external injuries of a certain entity – necessarily reinforce this hypothesis,” they detail. the magistrates of the high court.
The Supreme Court also dismisses the appeal of the person convicted of a crime of abuse, who argued that his right to the presumption of innocence had been violated. In the defense’s opinion, there was no evidence that he hit the victim in the face with his bare hands.
“It is about a man of more than 1.80 tall, 85 kilos, big hands and used to hard work (carnivore) and, nevertheless, he did not leave the slightest mark or injury. It is from every point of view It is impossible to assume that if, as those two witnesses say, he had hit him in that way, there would be no physical evidence in the form of injury,” the defense argued.
The magistrates recall that “this lack of visible wounds on the victim’s face is what led the Superior Court of Justice to partially uphold the appeal filed” by the convicted person “and to rectify the legal classification of applied in the instance”, changing the crime of injuries initially qualified by a light crime of mistreatment.
