Miguel López’s lawyer maintains that the parties did not see the first verdict because they did not request it, detracts from its destruction and accuses the Supreme Court of allowing itself to be influenced by “parallel trials”
Against the performance of the accusations, against the criteria of the supreme court and even against information that was published on the trial for the crime of María del Carmen Martínez, the widow of the former president of the CAM Vicente Sala. Against all this, the defense of Miguel López, son-in-law of the victim and the only accused of the murder perpetrated in the car wash of the automotive business that he ran on December 9, 2016, attacks in his amparo claim before the Constitutional Court (TC).
An appeal of which the parties have just been notified (the public prosecution and the private prosecution filed by the lawyer Francisco Ruiz Marco on behalf of María del Carmen’s eldest son) a week after the Alicante Court had to postpone the repeat oral hearingwhich was to begin on the 3rd, precisely because of the admission to processing of this amparo petition and the precautionary suspension of the second trial of López agreed by the TC.
A year ago, the Supreme Court ordered the annulment of the first, from which the defendant was acquitted, and to celebrate it again due to the serious errors that were committed and that, according to the High Court, caused defenseless against accusationsyes depriving them of the right to a fair trial.
Among other irregularities, the return of a first verdict for an alleged lack of motivation that could never be verified because the document was destroyed, as well as the way in which it was rejected. A record that, as this medium was able to learn, was from guilty by seven votes to two. After another 48 hours of deliberations and the change due to indisposition of one of the jurors, the people’s court voted to acquit the defendant by six votes to three.
For lawyer Javier Sánchez-Vera, López’s defense attorney, if the parties did not have access to the minutes it was not because the president of the court denied it but because they did not request it, which they could have done until the judicial lawyer destroyed it on the day following the second verdict, the lawyer maintains.
In his appeal against the Supreme Court decision, he insists that there are two acquittalsalluding to that of the Court of Alicante that was later ratified by the Superior Court of Justice of the Community, despite admitting that not all the proceedings were correct.
In his opinion, the Supreme Court’s decision to order the repetition of the trial violates the presumption of innocence of his client, a right that he urges to weigh with that of judicial protection of the accusations, in addition to having incurred “in an absolute lack of motivation regarding the existence of essential bankruptcies of the process.”
And he attributes the existence of that first condemnatory verdict, which the High Court cites in its judgment, to “a invented hypothesis for the private prosecution and reflected by some means of communication without any proof”. Going so far as to say that “the Supreme Court cannot echo a parallel trial to resolve the appeals that are raised”.
The lawyer also appeals to the “constitutional status of the accused”, says that “it is not the same to repeat a trial when the accused has been convicted than when he has been acquitted”, that if the hearing is held again the parties would already know the opponent’s strategy and that, in case of doubt, the interpretation must always be in favor of the accused.