The Supreme Court closes the case of the murder of Pedro Álvarez forever and leaves the crime unpunished

Pedro Álvarez was shot in the head by the driver of a car that almost ran over him and his girlfriend on the night of December 15, 1992 in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat (Barcelona). He then hit the road in his white Opel Vectra. The main suspect in the case was an agent of the Barcelona National Police, JMS He was arrested as the alleged perpetrator of the events and remained in provisional detention for a week, but was later released and the case was filed, in a move that the Álvarez’s family has always viewed with suspicion.

The family’s misgivings were not unfounded: the judges allowed the same police force to which the main suspect belonged to investigate the case, and tests were not even carried out to determine if he had gunpowder residue on his clothes despite the fact that his weapon was requisitioned The crime scene was also not preserved. The visual inspection of the intersection where Pedro was murdered lasted barely half an hour.

Throughout three decades, Juanjo Álvarez and Carmen Peso, Pedro’s parents, have not stopped demanding a thorough investigation of the case from the Justice, running into the slamming doors of different judges and prosecutors again and again. From most of the politicians they went to to publicize their son’s crime, they got little more than good words. That is if they came to receive them.

In 2020, Pedro’s relatives made the last attempt before Justice to find their son’s murderer. The result has not met the hopes of the family: both the L’Hospitalet investigating judge and the Barcelona Court (which did not allow the parents to attend the hearing) and now the Supreme Court have argued that the case is fully prescribed.

The ruling of the Supreme Court, for which Judge Javier Hernández has been a rapporteur, is the first throughout the case in which a judicial instance expresses its “empathy with the feeling of frustration” that the total file of the case generates in the family . The togados add that, despite the legitimate interest of the family in finding the murderer of their son, the rules of the Constitutional State “impose that all claims must be channeled by the rules” that regulate criminal action, among which are the prescription of crimes.

Known the sentence, the Álvarez family has opened an extrajudicial investigation campaign to “know the truth” and has called for neighborhood collaboration to collect any information, without legal consequence, that can “give them peace of mind.”

The High Court also defends that the prescription of the crime due to the passage of time “is not the consequence of an indolent procedural inactivity” but derives from “the impossibility of obtaining sufficient evidence of criminality towards certain persons after a profuse and detailed judicial investigation ”. An affirmation that the Álvarez Peso family does not share.