Paul Rigothe 82-year-old man who killed one of the thieves who broke into his home in Porreres (Mallorca) in February 2018could have been trapped in a situation of fear which affected his intellectual and volitional capacities which did not allow him to act other than to use his hunting rifle.
One of the forensic experts who assessed the old man, then 78, said this during the popular jury retrial held for a week in the Palma Provincial Court against Rigo and three others who planned and executed the robbery.
The prosecution is seeking a four-year prison sentence against the elderly man for the crime of homicide, while the private prosecution is increasing its request to ten years in prison. On the other hand, the thief – the twin brother of the deceased – risks a sentence of six years of deprivation of libertywhile the town planners, two neighbors of Fieldscould see their sentence reduced to three years after admitting their participation in the events.
He forensic expert from the Institute of Legal Medicine of the Balearic Islands who reported on the physical and mental injuries suffered by Rigo, determined that due to the fear he felt, the now octogenarian could have suffered a condition in your intellectual and voluntary capacities “that they did not allow him to govern his behavior in any other way, at that time, than using the shotgun.”
“Fear produces an adaptive response that attempts to resolve the problem you are experiencing. This affected by a frightening situationfears for his life and looks for a resource among the options he has, the one that can give him the most security, the one that has the simplest and quickest access,” said the expert.
However, he stressed, it is “indisputable” that Rigo knew he was shooting and then fired. “His voluntary intellective capacity, in the general analysis, is compatible with normality. Another thing is that in the situation in which he finds himself, in this situation of fear, he is capable of behavior other than that,” he said, reported by the Europa Press agency.
The coroner was also asked about the physical injuries Rigo suffered in various parts of the body and whether it took 241 days to heal. Some would have been caused by punches and others would be the result of an impact with a “blunt instrument”, he detailed.
Among the latter, some were from “figurative type”that is to say that they literally reproduce the morphology of the object that causes them. Although he ruled out that these injuries could have been caused by the shotgun – during the struggle with one of the robbers who tried to take the gun from him after the shot – he saw that he was possible that they were caused by a goat’s paw.
Questioned by Rigo’s defense lawyer, the coroner assured that a blow to the head with such a tool could “without a doubt” have caused his death. According to the old man’s statements last Friday, he shot the attacker moments after dodging an attack with the goat’s leg that was aimed precisely at his head.
To these physical injuries, he added, we must add the post-traumatic stress syndrome suffered by the octogenarian “for everything he suffered” on February 24, 2018, the day of the events.
More statements at trial
This Thursday, another coroner also testified that he had inspected Rigo a few weeks after the robbery, when he “still showed signs of having received serious blows, particularly to the face”.
This specialist was also responsible for carrying out the autopsy of the deceased who, according to his conclusions, lost his life on the 5:30 p.m. on the day of the incident, after being transferred to a hospital where surgeons could do nothing to save him.
Finally, according to his report, the attacker died as a result of hypovolemic shock and severe abdominal trauma caused by a gunshot. The bullet, he pointed out this Thursday, caused an entry hole of approximately eight centimeters in diameter.
This, added to other analyses, allowed him to determine that the shooting occurred at a “short” distance, between one and a half meters and five meters. Throughout the trial, the ballistics of the Civil Guard limited this distance to no more than two metersto which we should add the distance of the shotgun, 1.13 meters.
