The defense of both police officers convicted this week by Court of Courts for illegal detention of a woman will appeal against the sentence before the Superior Court. The agents’ lawyer assures the diary which disagrees with the court’s reasoning and maintains that the officials applied a protocol of criminal offenses which, despite being based on an erroneous legal interpretation, had been assumed and used for nearly twenty years without being effectively questioned by any institution.
Two police officers regulating traffic.
The lawyer places the main axis of the appeal here. According to defense, the procedure it was not an isolated practice of the two agentsbut an “institutionalized” way of acting, known by the police and also present in the usual circuit of criminal offenses. His thesis is that if the police are considered to have misinterpreted the law, that error cannot be disentangled from a system that had taught and allowed them to act that way for years.
The sentence of Courts convicted the officers of illegal detention, but acquitted them of the crime of degrading treatment. The court held that there were two distinct interventions. The first occurred following the withdrawal of a vehicle and ended when the officers were already leaving. The second, according to the resolution, began when the woman called them “ill-mannered”. Courts he understood that this expression, by itself, did not constitute a sufficient justification to activate a new action that ended with the transfer of the woman to police departments.
The defense argues that the two agents made a single action
A single performance
The defense rejects precisely this separation. The lawyer maintains that the two episodes they were part of the same sequence and that the “ill-mannered” could not be assessed in isolation from what had happened during the previous half hour. As he explains, the agents had faced one situation of tension, opposition and difficulties during the performance and had tried to avoid the escalation of the conflict. “One cannot be understood without the other”, summarizes the lawyer about the two phases that Courts considered independent.
The appeal will also be based on the name “ban error”. The defense maintains that the agents believed they could act that way because that’s how they had been trained and why it was the protocol that was usually applied. The lawyer insists that an eventual legal mistake by the two policemen should not automatically translate into criminal responsibility if it derived from a practice consolidated for years.
At this point, the lawyer considers particularly relevant that the Prosecutor’s Office withdraw the accusation. The public ministry he ended up understanding that the problem lay in the protocols and their interpretation, and not necessarily in an individual willingness of the officers to make an illegal arrest. The defense also maintains that the woman goes voluntarily accompany the policeanother of the elements he will use to discuss the criminal classification of the events.
The officers had been accused of illegal detention and degrading treatment for the events that occurred in 2020. Now, after the sentence handed down by Courtsthe defense prepares the appeal before the superior with the aim of reviewing both the reading of the police intervention and the responsibility attributed to the two officials.
THE POLICE UNION WANTS CLEAR ARRESTING PROTOCOLS
The CFPA defends that the case should not be analyzed only as an individual responsibility and calls for strengthening the coordination between the direction of the police, the Batllia and the Prosecutor’s Office. It also calls for regular meetings to review procedures that may raise legal doubts and prevent similar situations from ending up in court in the future.
