If it were not for the crime that was tried, an alleged rape of a woman, the chronicle of this picturesque trial would have a different aspect. The hearing at the Toledo provincial court was about to be suspended this Thursday due to lack of an interpreter in the Qingtian Chinese dialect, which only the accused, currently in temporary prison, speaks.
The official interpreter came as on other occasions, but the defense lawyer was not informed that his client, a sixty-year-old, only communicates with this dialect. “The reason is that he didn’t go to school in China.”they said in the hall.
As the lawyer did not inform the court in time, an interpreter of Qingtian, which is spoken in a suburban county of the same name under the administrative umbrella of the prefectural city of Lishui, had to be found in the hour.
After several efforts, we were able to find Linda, an employee of a bazaar in Toledo who arrived at the Court by taxi and entered the room after the session had already started. Ahead and behind closed doors, five and a half hours of oral hearing in Chinese and Spanish. The responses were long and tedious, as Linda had to translate the defendant’s words from Qingtian to Mandarin; and the court interpreter did it in Spanish.
A shared house
The prosecutor maintained his accusation of rape, relying primarily on the alleged victim’s statement, although the accused stated the opposite: that the sexual relations, reported in May 2023, were consensual. They performed in the house in the regional capital that they shared with other people: the wife of the alleged attacker and the alleged victim, with an aunt and a niece.
Several members of Toledo’s Chinese community paraded through the Noble Hall, difficult to locate from the Court due to address changes. They talked about some kind of negotiation for her, who was about 50 and also had a Chinese lawyer, to keep quiet in exchange for money.
The complaint for sexual assault with penetration, allegedly occurring on April 30, was formulated under the guidance of a cousin who lives in Barcelona. The alleged victim informed him and waited a few days for his loved one to arrive in Toledo before going to the police station. However, she did not attend the trial because she is pregnant and returned to China.
“Insufficient” prosecution evidence
“There are chiaroscuros and to convict you have to take an act of faith,” Juan Carlos Moraleda, the prisoner’s lawyer, told ABC after finishing the hearing at 4:10 p.m. “The testimony of the alleged victim is tainted by a host of irregularities, anomalies, paradoxes….“, he added. Therefore, “it cannot be that the existence of simple seminal remains on a sheet is sufficient and effective proof to motivate a conviction”, emphasized Moraleda, who also pointed out that the forensic report indicates that there were no injuries or scratches on the woman’s body.
“You cannot convict a person with a statement in which there is a spurious motive, which demonstrates the greed of the complainant, who tells my client that he must divorce his wife,” he insisted. “As he says no, four days later he files a complaint and in the middle he goes with his alleged attacker to negotiate compensation in a bar in the Polígono for having remained silent and so that my client’s wife does not know about the infidelity ” he said. continued.
“My client says so and it was supported by several witnesses at trial,” said the lawyer, who called the accused’s wife as a witness. “She proved that the nuclear element that triggered the complaint was that the wife began to utter a series of atrocities on a social network.” This is WeChat, a free messaging and calling service application similar to WhatsApp and used by the Chinese community.
The prosecutor asks for a prison sentence of eight and a half years; The private accusation brings it to twelve and the defense, the free acquittal.
