This Monday the 25th, the judges of the Court of Appeal of Puerto Plata, judges José Núñez (president), Jenny Amarilis Martínez and Praire Ruiz (members), on the occasion of the appeal filed by citizen Wander Franco, decided – in voce – granting him a judicial pardon, after declaring him guilty of sexual and psychological abuse against a minor. Likewise, he sentenced her mother to 10 years for commercial sexual exploitation and money laundering.
The ruling shows the level of social decomposition of Dominican society, and the depth of the moral hole in which it finds itself, since, despite the magistrates confirming that Mr. Franco did commit the crime to the detriment of a minor; and, consequently, the qualities of victim and perpetrator being established, they proceeded to grant him a pardon that exempts him from serving his sentence in a penitentiary facility, on the basis that, “the accused in this case is also a victim (…) of rapacious human behavior that forgets principles and values…”.
Almost in a tone of reproach, the presiding judge ruled that “The complaint arose, the events occurred and everything could have remained in the mystery of the shadow of a family’s secret, however human interests flowed in such a way that they placed us in this scenario as a public spectacle in a questionable situation.”
In other words, the magistrates reinterpreted at will the causal, linear and temporal relationship of the criminal act, endorsing the role of victim on the person who abused a minor, on the basis that, once the crime was committed, the dynamic of blackmail exercised – ex post – by the mother, operated retroactively as an excuse for the crime committed ex ante.
Rigor forces us to wait for the full evacuation (and never better said) of the ruling, not to appeal it – as the Public Ministry correctly announced that it would do – but to see the legal juggling that these three judges did, to justify the status of victim of an aggressor declared guilty, and grant forgiveness of the sentence, despite the fact that due to the crime, circumstances and minority of the victim, it did not correspond.
For these judges, the abuse of a minor “could have remained in the mystery of the shadow of a family’s secret,” because what is reprehensible is not the fact itself, but rather its public disclosure.
The ruling may not indicate sufficient legal motivations, it may also be that the popular court thinks that there are others… The truth is that, of everything abominable and detestable that this ruling embodies and represents, the worst is the message that the Judiciary sends to a society where in 2025 alone, some 537 girls between 9 and 15 years old became pregnant.
In the absence of public policies and social empathy, we will now have to deal with the insensitivity of judges for whom the perpetrators not only do not fall prisoner, but are also victims.
