The Supreme Court has endorsed the sentence of 20 years in prison imposed by the Provincial Court of Córdoba on a Franciscan for abusing four of his students when they were under 13 years old. The case was discovered when one of them, at the age of 16, told the police who treated her on the street while she was drunk.
The Court’s ruling, later confirmed by the Superior Court of Justice of Andalusia, declared proven that the convicted person, who belonged to the order of the Friars Minor (Franciscans), taught classes from the beginning of the 2012/2013 academic year as a teacher at the Santa María de Guadalupe school (known as the Franciscans) and at least until 2014 he was parish priest of the Santa María de Guadalupe Parish.
Among his students There were several third and fourth graders whom he subjected to touching inside the classroom, “habitually sitting them on his knees when correcting homework.” or taking advantage of the fact that he sometimes stayed there with the girls during recess, touching that he performed guided by a libidinous spirit and without using force or intimidation to do so“. He “touched their buttocks, their inner thighs, their waist, their abdomen and lifted their skirts to put his hand up their legs,” or “he put his hand in their chest, under their clothes, and in the genital area he touched under her panties on more than one occasion.”
In the 2014/2015 school year, in a camp organized by the school itself in the same school, the convicted person asked two of them to ““They went with him to his office with the excuse of collecting candy for the children.”. Once there she sat the minors on top of her legs, but “she only managed to touch one of them’s waist because the girl got up, uncomfortable, and stood on the other side of the office table.” She held the other over him and “He touched her legs, her butt, and even caressed her genital area under her clothes. When they left, the girl was so affected that she cried,” which was seen by another girl, who later served as a witness at the trial.
Change of school
The little girl told her parents what had happened and they sent a letter to the school director on December 2, 2014. Shortly after, the convicted person was transferred to another town. The girl “received assistance at the Córdoba Centro community mental health unit, referred by her pediatrician, because she was afraid of men who might approach her and when she passed by the office” where the abuse occurred.
On the occasion of “the graduation of compulsory secondary education, the possibility of inviting” the teacher was discussed, which made the girl “She anxiously relived what had happened to the point that, affected by it, at the Córdoba Fair, she consumed alcoholic beverages on May 30. until she reached a state of drunkenness, and, when she was assisted by local police officers revealed what happened with his professor”, which gave rise to “the initiation of the investigations that initiated this procedure”.
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The professor, convicted of four continuous crimes of sexual abuse of minors under 13 years of age, with precedence of their status as teachers, punishable by five years in prison For each of them, he appealed in cassation when he understood that there was not enough evidence of his abuses. The Supreme Court denies this possibility and supports the criteria of the Andalusian courts that “reasonably excluded the possibility of fabulatory tendencies” in the witnesses, that what they “narrated at the trial” coincided with what “recorded in the first examinations before the National Police, which reinforces the reliability of his testimony.”
They also took into account that the accused justified the presence of the girls in his office. saying that there were “hoaxes” at schoolwhich, for the court means that “cannot be explained other than by distrust towards their constant abusive behaviorwhich offers additional corroboration of what was maintained in the examinations, given that what was perceived by the minors was not a casual contact, to the extent that, for reviewing the lessons or homework of 10 or 11 year old girls it was completely unnecessary to touch their butt, breasts or vaginal area, under the sweater or skirt”.