Guilty of completed murder and attempted murder. This was the verdict of the popular jury in the trial against the accused of the crime of Velle (Ourense).
The five men and four women of the citizen court made the decision in less than twelve hours. The court spokesperson presented the guilty verdict which takes up the thesis defended by the prosecution, which requested 24 years in prison and which accepts the suffering of a paranoid schizophrenia as a mitigating factor, even if “he knew what he was doing”.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office maintained its request with only one upward modification: it maintains the 17 years in prison requested for the murder and increases it by six months, from 7 to 7 years and 6 months, attempted murder suffered by the sole survivor of the crime of February 19, 2021.
unanimous verdict
The jury considered unanimously proven that the accused left his home with the intention of ending the lives of his cousin and his partner that night, which is why he brought a knife into his house and told his mother that he was going to kill rabbits.
When he arrived at the house where his cousin and his girlfriend lived, he shouted “open, open”, and when the relative opened the door He lunged at him saying “I’m going to kill you” and he started stabbing her with the knife several times on different parts of her body.
At that moment, the young woman appeared and implored the accused to stop the attack because “he is already dead”. “Far from ceasing his attitude, he attacks him by giving him two deep wounds to the neck and chest, continue to give him multiple cuts all over his body which earned him a “severe acute hemorrhage and death”dictates the subject matter of the verdict declared proven. Likewise, they consider that she was defenseless against the attack.
Also in the verdict they see that it is proven that after the crime the accused He got rid of the knife by throwing it at a nearby farm. before returning to his residence, a shed on a neighboring farm. He deactivated the alarm, answered the call to the security center, correctly provided the password and apologized to his mother before removing his bloody clothes and going to bed.
While all this was happening, Álvaro, injured, managed to crawl to the phone and call your father saying that their cousin had stabbed them, and, in case he didn’t survive, He wrote the accused’s name on the ground in his own blood.
The whole story was unanimously proven by the popular jury; the survivor’s own statement was the key.
“I knew what I was doing”
For the popular jury, the accused “he knew what he was doing, as well as the consequences of his actions” despite his paranoid schizophrenia. A conclusion they reached “based on the statement of the forensic experts”, who reported it in the courtroom during the hearing. However, the jury found it proven that on the day of the events, due to this mental illness, “he had slightly limited their ability to understand and act.
Which rejects the court it is cruelty, a thesis supported by private accusations; both the one representing the family of the deceased and that of the survivor. The juries They do not see this point as proven by a majority of eight votes out of a total of nine. based on the coroner’s opinions.
They do not support the granting of a pardon if it is requested, nor the benefit of a suspension of the execution of the sentence if the legal conditions for this purpose are met.
Thus, after reading the verdict and once the prosecution increased the sentence to six months in prison, theBoth private accusers have maintained their respective demands. The lawyer representing the family of the murdered young woman is asking for 20 years in prison for this crime, then an additional ten years, thereafter, of supervised release and removal. While the survivor’s lawyer asks for 15 years in prison for attempted murder.
THE the defense requested the minimum diplomas sentence for both murders, taking into account the mitigating circumstance of mental illness. The trial was heard for sentencing.
