“It’s frivolous,” says Reyes Mate, who charges harshly against the Police and the judge after revoking the ruling by demonstrating the error
The philosopher Matte Kings, 80 years old, is all reproaches against the Police, against the head of the court of instruction number 4 of Gijón and against the telephone company that provides service. The reason is a sentence for which he was sentenced to a two-month fine with a fee of eight euros per day, considering that he had stolen a mobile at three in the morning in a pub in the nightlife area of Fomento, in Gijón, to a minor, the October 31, 2021. The thinker, who lives in Madrid, put his case in the hands of some Asturian lawyers who have managed to get the Provincial Court to revoke the surreal ruling. The reason is simple: he hasn’t set foot in Gijón for four years.
The philosopher, winner of the National Essay Prize in 2009, explains that in March he received a phone call from people who identified themselves as agents from the Gijón Police Station and who asked him what the serial number of his mobile phone was. “I was a bit surprised. I told them that I couldn’t see him while I was talking on the phone and that they should call me later”, he explains. What he did was go to a Police Station in Madrid, where the agents told him that this was not a normal procedure, but that the police from Gijón should ask the people of Madrid to request that information from him, instead of asking for it by phone, says Reyes Mate.
That is what he replied to the agents from Gijón when they called him again to ask him to provide them with the serial number of his cell phone. “They got angry and told me ‘you’re going to find out’ and, shortly after, I received a summons for a hearing because they accused me of having stolen a mobile phone.”
Reyes Mate points out that the serial number of the stolen phone was very similar to his, but not the same, since “they differed in the last digit.” The philosopher assures that he transferred this information through a legal representative, despite the fact that, after a month, “I received notification from the court of instruction number 4 of Gijón telling me that he had been convicted of having stolen the mobile from a minor , carelessly removing it from a jacket pocket in a pub, when I was not in Gijón on that date”. The octogenarian considers that “the normal thing is that a judge, if he sees that I am 80 years old and I live in Madrid, doubts that I walk at three in the morning in a nightclub in Gijón.” And he goes further. He believes that the way to proceed against him is “very worrying” and a “frivolity”.
In addition, he assures that he did not find out until receiving the sentence that the investigators linked his telephone card to the stolen terminal whose serial number differs by one digit from his own, something that Reyes Mate attributes to the fact that it could be an illegally “duplicated” card, noting that he checked with his telephone company that there had been “no change in expenses” on the bill for the use of the card, which he had continued to use “regularly without cost change”.
Reyes Mate rates “terrible” everything that happened to him, that he still “doesn’t understand very well”. He points out that, in his case, if it had not been clarified that it was not related to the theft, “in the end this was going to cost me about a thousand euros, between paying for the stolen mobile, the costs and the daily fine of eight euros for two months” . But this proceeding could be more serious if it were “on acts that affect freedom or heritage.”