Friday, March 29

Palomas’ complaint filed against La Salle’s brother for prescription of sexual crimes


The wall of prescription stands in the way of a complaint of sexual abuse against a religious. The judge of Mataró (Barcelona) who admitted Alejandro Palomas’s complaint against La Salle’s brother Jesús Linares upon verifying that the sexual assaults and abuses perpetrated on the writer are prescribed.

The priest who raped Palomas continued with the abuse in another school: “He grabbed my breasts hard and I couldn’t react”

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In addition to raising his voice publicly, Palomas took his complaint to court last January against brother Linares, who subjected him to repeated sexual abuse and raped him in some camps during his school years in the mid-1970s at the school in the Hall of Premià de Mar (Barcelona). The case of Palomas served for other victims to reveal Linares’ continued pederasty for decades in the de la Salle schools and lament the cover-up of the abuses by the religious institution.

The joint investigation by elDiario.es and El Periódico has led, apart from Palomas’s complaint, to the opening of two proceedings by the Prosecutor’s Office on Linares’ abuses at the La Salle de Premià and Montcada y Reixac schools (Barcelona ). As the Mataró judge has done in the case of Palomas, the first thing that the Public Ministry will analyze is the prescription of the crime, given that the reported abuses occurred over four decades – from the mid-1970s to early 2000s.

Regarding the denunciation of Palomas, there are no doubts. The Prosecutor’s Office and the Investigating Court 3 of Mataró have verified that the abuses of Linares are prior to 1980, for which the Penal Code of 1973 was in force, which imposed a five-year statute of limitations for the crime of “dishonest abuse” to minors.

The facts denounced by Palomas “are prescribed for criminal purposes, and consequently, the responsibility of the alleged perpetrator [Linares] is extinguished”, concludes the three-page order. The decision is appealable before the court itself and before the Barcelona Court.

The statute of limitations issue adds complexity to the already complicated claims of victims of sexual abuse. And he notes that the times of the victims and of Justice are not always synchronized. Trauma management and the courage to break the silence, processes that can take years, are opposed by the fact that the statute of limitations for sexual abuse of minors begins to count when the victim reaches the age of majority. Then the clock starts counting down and the crimes prescribe between 5 and 15 years later, depending on their seriousness.

This implies that a victim can file a complaint up to the age of 33 in the case of the sexual offense with the highest penalty. This has been the case for years in cases like that of Palomas and other victims. With the latest legislative reform, approved last year, victims now have up to 50 years to report, although this change does not affect the prescription of abuses committed during the past decades. The reason is that criminal modifications cannot be applied retroactively against criminals, both pederasts and other criminals.

At the national level, the State Attorney General’s Office has announced its objective of investigating all cases of pederasty that have occurred within the Church. The attorney general, Dolores Delgado, ordered the Higher Prosecutor’s Offices of Spain to refer all the cases in process both in the courts and in the different prosecutor’s offices on assaults and sexual abuse of minors committed by religious. Altogether, there are 68 investigations for abuses in religious institutions throughout the country.



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