The Constitutional Court has decided to sanction a Lawyer from Barcelona for falsifying the content of the decisions of the TC itself that he cited in an appeal for protection. The claim was not admitted to processing and, in addition, the Guarantees Court transferred the case to the Barcelona Bar Association “for the corresponding disciplinary effects”, states the agreement, known to EL ESPAÑOL.
The unprecedented sanction decision was adopted by the president of the TC, Cándido Conde-Pumpido, after being deliberated last week by the First Chamber.
In examining the appeal for amparo filed by lawyer JLC, in defense of a client in a civil procedure for a change of name, the TC noted that a total of 19 decisions of the Constitutional Court itself extracted by the lawyer were cited with invented paragraphswhich did not correspond to the resolutions identified by their number and date.
The court refused to accept the appeal for processing “due to the lack of justification for the requirement of special constitutional significance.”
He justified this by pointing out that “in the argumentation of this part of the application, the existence of a constitutional doctrine contained in the judgments was alleged in quotation marks with the paragraphs supposed to be included therein, citations which, however, did not correspond to reality.”
This occurred in a total of 19 sentences that the lawyer attributed to TC, place its content in quotation marks as if it were a literal transcription resolutions. But none of these literal quotes corresponded to the real legal basis for such convictions.
The TC also agreed to open a sanction procedure, addressing the allegations against JLC.
A poorly configured Excel?
The lawyer acknowledged that “in fact, the sentences spoken do not correspond to the quotes that were made of them” and gave as an explanation: “alleged” – says the TC – deconfiguration of an Excel database which the lawyer said he had prepared with the decisions of different courts related to the case.
According to the lawyer, only one Excel column had been incorrectly configured, that of the date and number of the resolutions, so that the text associated with them no longer corresponded to them.
The lawyer said he was “completely unaware” that the chronological order in the Excel spreadsheet had broken the correspondence between the sentences and their summary or quote.
He ends his writing by calling this result “involuntary” and ask apology in court.
The TC also proposed an allegations process for taxwho considered the justification given by the lawyer “perfectly credible” and considered that no sanction was necessary, “not even the slightest warning”.
According to the prosecutor, “the assumption of responsibility for the incompetence incurred and the corresponding apologies requested by the court for having disrupted its normal functioning (…) seem to us to be a sufficient response to repair the error committed.”
No match
The sanction resolution first emphasizes that the lawyer’s memorandum of allegations “was not accompanied by the Excel database to which it refers, and he in no way credits the veracity of his story“.
“Whether the computer misconfiguration to which he refers is true, which has in no way been attempted to prove, or whether these quotes are due to other causes (use of the artificial intelligencefalse quotation marks of the lawyer’s own arguments to give more weight to his arguments, etc.), the problem does not lie in a simple discrepancy between doctrinal citations and dates of convictions, but rather none of the paragraphs quotes that appear in the application for protection is found with this text in any decision of this Constitutional Court“.
Even if these quotes had been real but belonged to different sentences – which is not the case – the TC considers that “the responsibility of the lawyer responsible for the defense of his client, party to a constitutional process, required a thorough verification of the wording of the application (and any other writing that was required to be recorded), thus correcting what had been done wrongly” before recording it in court.
Lawyer’s Responsibility
“The selection of the factual and legal arguments that support the procedural claim of his client, including the necessary verification of the veracity of the citations of the constitutional doctrine integrated into said foundation, is an act for which the lawyer is responsible. who signs the document, having always consciously and voluntarily accepted to assume his defense”, underlines the TC.
For the court, JLC’s actions not only compromised the viability of his client’s claim – “which in this case meant the inadmissibility of the aforementioned appeal” – but that “there was a lack of respect on the part of the judges of the First Chamber responsible for ruling, not in the form of insults or express disqualifications, but with a clear contempt for the jurisdictional function they exercise, by attributing to them the knowledge of a series of statements in quotation marks of the constitutional doctrine that they had to accept as good, when they lacked any anchoring in reality.
“Reading this bizarre statement,” he adds, “has led to a disruption – as the lawyer himself described it – of the normal jurisdictional work of the Second Section, and then of the First Chamber, not because it was necessary to verify the veracity of each citation included in the complaint, which is always done with all the writings and resources, but because of having to judge the consequences of such an unjustified irregularity, both at the procedural level and, extraordinarily also, at this level of sanction.
“Therefore,” he concludes, “failure to comply with this task does not imply an expression of imprudence or negligence, but rather constitutes a wilful failure to perform professional duty, for an unimportant reason of this behavior.”
Warning
The Constitutional Court considers that the offence was committed, consisting of the fact that the lawyer incurred “a lack of respect due to the magistrates of the First Chamber of this Court and to the consideration that it deserves as a State institution”.
The sanction was the lightest possible, a warning, given “the lawyer’s lack of experience with other facts that merited disciplinary reprimand before this court” and the seriousness of the fact, “mitigated by the impossibility for these appointments to have the legal effect sought, since it became evident that its unreality would be revealed.”
The sanction of a lawyer is very rare in the TC. In a previous case, the court addressed the Madrid Bar Association to inform it of the forensic acts of two lawyers who presented massive appeals with the same legal basis and without correspondence with the facts disseminated during each procedure, but the Constitutional Court did not initiate sanction proceedings.
