He supreme court established this Wednesday the criterion that should prevail before the penalty reductions from which they have benefited, through the application of the law of ‘only yes is yes’, a thousand inmates of sexual assaults with a final sentence. As was foreseeable, the high court has ratified the criteria applied so far by the provincial courts. These, in a general way, have been considering that the law did not include any provision that would prevent the general criterion established in article 2.2 of the Penal Code, which refers to the retroactivity of the law most favorable to the accused, from being imposed.
In the “only yes is yes” law, they did not want to include the transitory provision that it had been incorporated into the reform of the Penal Code of 1995 and that it specified that the punishment should not be lowered when the sentence imposed on the aggressor continued within the range provided for the crime in the new law. Despite the forgetfulness, the prosecution appealed for the 1995 provision to be applied, but the Supreme Court has ruled it out. The first attempt by the Government to avoid the reductions has also been rejected, without assuming that there was a mistake to correctthrough the introduction in the sedition reform of a purely declaratory paragraph that referred to the transitory provision of 1995. That it was an insufficient mending was made clear when a reform of the law was finally imposed on April 29 with the votes of the PSOE and the PP, although it will only prevent the perpetrators of the attacks committed after that date from benefiting from the legislative mess.
The fact that the reduction in sentences has been unanimously endorsed of the Criminal Chamber, made up of 15 magistrates, with the exception of only one of the 29 cases examined, dismantles the argument used by the Ministry of Equality that the judges were “sexist” and reactionaries who misapplied the law. In fact, before the pronouncement of the Supreme Court, judges of different ideologies, conservatives and progressives, had already agreed that they had no other option than to lower the sentences in the cases under debate.
The decision confirms that the defect was in the wording of the law and not in a bias in its application by the judges. The drafters of the norm in the Ministry of Equality did not take into account that unifying the crimes of aggression and abuse in only one could lead, as has happened, in the reduction of sentences. Until May 1, the reductions amount to 1,079 (with 108 releases) of the 2,301 cases reviewed.
In this matter, one of the most has damaged the image of the coalition governmentthere has been a tendency, especially marked in some of the ministries managed by Unidas Podemos but not exclusively, of prioritize more the achievement of the striking headline and ideologically comforting than the effective results of the reforms. The technical quality of the laws has suffered due to the limited openness to debate, the reluctance to admit errors and the tendency to always blame third parties, be they coalition partners, be they judges, be it a social majority indicated for not understand poorly explained reforms.