The Barcelona Court has acquitted the young man whom the Prosecutor’s Office asked for three years in prison for throwing a toolbox at the Vox deputy in the Parlament Joan Garriga in a protest against an act of the far-right party. The judges sentence the other accused youth, although they impose the minimum sentence –one year in prison–, well below the six years in prison requested by the Public Ministry.
Police word: enough to convict, but also removable
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The events occurred in February 2019. Before the ‘Cañas por España’ event that Vox held in a restaurant in the center of Barcelona, a hundred people gathered against the far-right party. There were some throwing of objects and intervention of the Mossos d’Esquadra. The accusation of the Prosecutor’s Office, which requested harsh sentences as is customary in trials for disturbances in Catalonia, was based on the testimony of the agents and that of Garriga himself, who could not point to the defendant as the author of the launch .
The sentence is far from fulfilling the expectations of the Public Ministry. Regarding the first accused, the judges of the 6th section of the Barcelona Court are clear: the evidence presented by the Prosecutor’s Office against him is “clearly insufficient” to convict him. For the judges “it is not proven” that the accused was even in the protest against Vox. Moreover, the sentence records that the defense of the young man, exercised by Benet Salellas, waived the two Mossos agents who had supposedly seen the accused at the concentration to testify, without the Prosecutor’s Office protesting and demanding his statement.
The second defendant, represented by the lawyer Àlex Solà, receives the minimum sentence for the crime of public disorder. The judges emphasize that the young man was part of a “particularly aggressive” group in the face of the “low profile” of the majority of people who protested against Vox. Said group, the sentence continues, threw cans and objects at the police line “without causing any injury” to agents or guests of the extreme right-wing act.
The magistrates sentence that the young man threw a bottle against the restaurant where the Vox act was being held, as three mossos observed, and that he then moved a fence and kicked a pallet and then kicked the blinds of an aesthetic establishment several times . The minimum penalty is explained because there is no proof that the bottle hit the door of the restaurant or caused material damage or damage to people, nor is it proven that the young man acted with his face covered or in a group, circumstances that the Prosecutor’s Office claimed to aggravate the penalty up to six years in prison.
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