The Constitutional Court has forced the courts of the Region of Murcia to hear the claims of the mother of a child murdered by his father in Beniel in 2019. The plenary assembly, after four years without reaching an agreement on the matter, has upheld the appeal of a woman against the judges’ refusal to admit her complaint for miscarriage of justice against the judgments and judgments that, according to her complaint, allowed her ex-husband to be free and take her 11-year-old son to attack him repeatedly at home before committing suicide.
The courts, explains the plenary session with the votes against the conservative sector, have been too rigid in studying the deadlines in which this trial for miscarriage of justice could be presented against the decisions, understands the woman, which facilitated the murder of her son at the hands of the father. Now, the judges will have to admit this request for treatment, although it may be rejected when they rule on the merits of the case.
The murder took place in this town of 20,000 inhabitants in the Comarca de la Huerta in July 2019. A month earlier, the parricide had been convicted of gender-based violence in two consecutive sentences by the same court, but the court had not considered his entry into prison necessary. A month later, he ignored the restraining order, took little Cristian to the house where they had lived and murdered the child before committing suicide.
The mother publicly denounced, including in a letter to King Felipe VI, that the system had not protected her son and that a change in regulations was necessary to avoid cases of indirect violence like this one. He also filed a complaint against the justice system for miscarriage of justice, denouncing that the justice system should have ordered his imprisonment and not suspended the execution of his six-month sentence for sexist violence, a freedom that allowed him to murder the child.
According to her trial, the sexist murderer took only 12 days to skip his first sentence. In addition, this sentence wrongly reflected that he had no criminal record when he did have one, something judges also take into account when deciding whether or not to incarcerate a convicted person. The woman claimed in her appeals that “the sentence imposed should never have been suspended and even, by legal imperative, his entry into prison should have been ordered to serve his sentence.”
A “disproportionate obstacle”
Until now, his claims of miscarriage of justice had been dismissed. Not because of the merits of the case but because the judges have so far considered that he had filed his claim out of time: more than three months after the convictions and orders that, according to him, wrongly released his ex-partner. “The trial was brought after the deadline had already passed,” the Supreme Court simply stated more than four years ago. His defense demanded flexibility because the error only materialized when, a month after the sentence was handed down, the man killed the child.
The Constitutional Court, with five votes against the conservative sector, decided to protect this mother. “In exceptional cases, ordinary courts must relax this criterion and begin the calculation to file the claim, not from the date of notification of the judicial resolution, but from the moment the damage occurred,” explains the plenary assembly.
In this case, the woman could not have known the effect that the June 2019 orders would have, before her son was murdered, and filed this lawsuit within the time limits set by law. Furthermore, the judicial decisions that have so far rejected their claims, he explains, have not taken into account “the fact that the trial referred to a case of indirect violence in which, moreover, fundamental rights had been affected”. The delays, the Constitutional Court ruled, represented “a disproportionate and unreasonable obstacle to the objective of the claim submitted by the applicant, which was to subsequently demand financial responsibility from the State due to a miscarriage of justice”.
