Hugo Tomei, lawyer for the 8 rugbiers charged in the murder of Fernando Baez Sosa, from the beginning he maintained that the media were trying to make rugby players look like “some savages”. In one of his first interviews in 2020, he insisted that at least 6 of the rugbiers “had nothing to do with it.” He also suggested irregularities on the part of the Buenos Aires Police, and the forensic team that analyzed the cell phones of the accused, in addition to the prosecution itself.
“What I see on television hurts me as a human being. The little I see, because I don’t want to see anymore because it hurts me, because I’m having a bad time, because I can’t understand that there is a deceased boy and put on a show about the ten detainees and most of them have nothing to do (…) The attack or the fight, whatever you want to call it, lasted 13 seconds, according to witnesses. They left. Some put on beach clothes, went to have breakfast and sleep. (…) There is no chance that ten kids will hit one. They don’t go around it”, were some of the things that Tomei said when the Báez Sosa Case shook public opinion.
From the beginning of the case, the rugbiers’ lawyer maintained that the friends of Fernando Baez Sosa They were “modifying their story” about what happened, since first they said that the rugbiers “fucked it up” and then that “they were not allowed to go defend Fernando,” Tomei said.
In mid-2021, Tomei filed an extraordinary appeal to demand the end of the preventive detention of young people, since, according to his argument, the defendants did not have their rights “to be heard” respected, given that the prosecutor Veronica Zamboni He acknowledged having communicated his accusation “at 10 at a time.”
Following this argument, Tomei affirmed that the Prosecutor’s Office “accused all of them for the same conduct when he later described different actions.” Also, accused prosecutor Zamboni of “exposing” rugbiers “in the face of a state of total defenselessness in the face of the apparent actions of the official defense.”
For the Supreme Court of Justice Buenos Aires, Tomei’s proposal was “inadmissible”, and he rejected it. “Beyond the dogmatic allusions to a ‘defenseless state’ and the violation of the right to be heard, it did not demonstrate the existence of a surprising change that would have hindered the right that —generally— alleges violated,” the judges specified. In addition, they added that Tomei did not explain what defenses he was deprived of exercising, which means that the challenge is considered “insufficient.”
At the end of February 2022, Tomei denounced Zamboni for alleged ideological falsehood and illegal deprivation of liberty of the accused. The strategy was based on the fact that, according to the lawyer, at the beginning of the case there were irregularities in the records of the investigative statements taken from the defendants after their arrest. Thanks to this strategy, the Appeals Chamber from the city of pains He accepted that the accused rugby players were considered “individual victims”.
This year, when the trial hearings began, Tomei engaged in various strategies to favor the defendants. He first argued that the prosecutors in the case, Veronica Zamboni Y Walter Mercury, they never informed the youths of the charges for which they were accused, and this prevented them from exercising their right to defense. The judges did not uphold the request.
Another of the proposals in the defense of the rugbiers was refuse to allow the defendants to undergo psychological and psychiatric examinations that had been requested by the complaint and the prosecution for the oral trial. The decision was based on the fact that, as they explained, they did not trust the investigation that the rugbiers suffered a “media persecution”, promoted above all by the Báez family lawyer, Fernando Burlando.
“I do not want to make a statement because I do not feel well, since from the beginning my private life and that of my family were exposed, so I do not want to offer more information that will help Dr. (Fernando) Burlando continue putting together a media show of the cause”, stated Matias Benicelli, one of the defendants through a statement presented by Tomei. Too Enzo Comelli Y maximum thomsen They refused the expertise, arguing in a similar way to Benicelli.
But Tomei’s central strategy is to demonstrate that there was no premeditation in the murder of Báez Sosa, and that there was no intent to kill either. This would cause the penalty years to be significantly reduced. During the oral debate, the defender of the rugby players stated that the crime was in the context of a homicide in a fight or assault that, according to the Article 95 of the Penal Codeprovides for a sentence of between 2 to 6 years in prison, far from the sentence requested by the prosecution for the accused: life imprisonment.
In the last plea, the prosecutor gustavo garcia He maintained that the crime was committed with “premeditation” although “there were no roles or functions, everyone did everything, agreed and beat him.” “The prior contest does not require much deliberation, it can be instantaneous. In this event there was a strategy, a planning of how to start the attack,” said García, who declared that “in the opinion of the Prosecutor’s Office it was doubly aggravated homicide for having been committed with treachery and the competition of two or more people and in competition with repeated minor injuries”, he defined.
“Tomei’s strategy is understandable, I would have done the same. From the beginning, trying to attack the investigative statement ”, says the lawyer Pablo Fernandez Pereira. Regarding Tomei’s strategy of demonstrating that there was no treachery or premeditation, Fernández Pereira is skeptical. “A possible strategy would be to try to show that it was a homicide in fightor a preintentional homicide, that is, to state that they hit Fernando but that they did not want to kill him. But it is that the burden of proof is so great that I see it as very difficult. There are more than 20 witnesses who say that this is not the case, and there was no fight between two groups to prove that it was a fight. Where you try to prove that there was no premeditation, there is evidence that refutes it,” said the lawyer.
“After 35 years of serving the sentence, you can request the release of the convicted person. That does not mean that they will give it to you. You can request it, but it depends on the judge’s decision,” explains Fernández Pereira, who also believes that this trial is far from over now.”Whether they get life imprisonment or not, the parties will appeal. This goes to the Chamber because they are going to appeal either low or high”; she concluded.
by RN
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