The Supreme Court rejected the prosecution’s thesis and upheld the first sentence reductions for sex offenders brought to its desk using the “only yes is yes” law. Criminal judges confirm the criteria of the territorial courts and do not reject the seven appeals of the prosecutor’s office requesting the annulment of the reduction and the 22 appeals of the violators requesting this downward revision.
Magistrates examined nearly 30 cases of abusers across the country seeking to have their final sentences reduced. They rejected not only prosecutorial appeals seeking some downward revisions, but also appeals from abusers who challenged the judges’ refusal to sign off on the reductions. In fact, seven complaints from the prosecutor’s office and 22 complaints from sex offenders were rejected. For example, with this decision, the Supreme Court confirms that the prison sentence of more than 60 years for a police officer in Buriana (Castello) for violence against 10 minors remains unchanged.
The arguments of each case will be known in the coming days, but the rulings of various provincial courts, which have now been confirmed, already outline a general criterion: the minimum sentence must be adjusted to the new minimum sentence, if it is lower, and the intermediate sentence. It is possible that the new law will remain the same.
As elDiario.es learned, one of the cases studied was that of a resident of Soria who was sentenced to seven years in prison, an intermediate sentence, for raping his friend. The Supreme Court, with the prosecution’s criteria, challenged the Soria court’s criteria: review is only appropriate if the sentence was imposed with its minimum term of six years, the judges said.
However, in another case, they supported a reduction because it was the minimum sentence, which is now lower. A man in Bizkaia has been sentenced to eight years in prison for abusing a little girl in Leioa. “Since we have changed this minimum, we believe that we should be on such a change, and therefore we will review the sentence,” the judges of the Basque Country said in a decision appealed by the prosecutor’s office and now confirmed in the Supreme Court.
The vast majority of cases were decided by unanimous agreement of the 15 members of the plenary session of the second chamber, but in one of them unanimity was not achieved, and several magistrates will sign a private vote on this particular case.
Over 1000 sales and incomplete data
A plenary session of the Supreme Court was held this week to review about three dozen cases of sex offenders seeking to reduce their final sentences under a law that took effect in October. To date, it has only heard cases that have not yet been sentenced and has yet to establish criteria for how the law will affect sentences already announced years ago and before it took effect.
According to the General Council of the Judiciary, between October 2022 and May 2023, different Spanish courts signed more than 1,000 reductions of sentences for perpetrators and perpetrators of the use of this rule, including a hundred dismissals. Some of the data, which the judges’ governing body admits, is incomplete because they don’t know how many abatement requests have been denied and some areas report incomplete statistics.
In cases that have not yet been decided, the Supreme Court has established a series of criteria for each type of case. The new law, for example, did not change the maximum sentence, and the sentences in this case remained the same. If you were directly sentenced to a reduced minimum sentence, your new sentence must be adjusted and reduced. If the trial court imposed an intermediate sentence, the count was substantiated and under the new law it is still possible to not touch the sentence.
Source: El Diario
