Admits the appeals of those convicted for lack of impartiality of two magistrates
The Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court (TS) has annulled the ruling of the Superior Court of Justice (TSJ) of Catalonia that sentenced the four former members of the Parliamentary Bureau Anna Simó, Lluis María Corominas, Ramona Barrufet and Lluis Guinó for a crime of disobedience by 1-O considering that two of the three magistrates had externalized their positions before passing sentence, which would violate the principle of impartiality, for which he orders a repeat trial.
In the sentence, a report by Judge Leopoldo Puente, it is explained that these two judges evidenced in previous proceedings “an explicit position on issues that later became the essential object of the trial.” That is why they agree to repeat the trial with a different composition of the court for the four members, who were imposed 1 year and 8 months of disqualification and a fine of 30,000 euros.
It was in October 2020 when the Civil and Criminal Chamber of the TSJC sentenced the four for not heeding the warnings of the Constitutional Court (TC) and processing resolutions related to the pro-independence ‘procés’, while acquitting former CUP deputy Mireia Boya of the same facts.
Now the Supreme points out the Supreme Court that does not harbor the slightest doubt, taking into account the professional career of the magistrates, that “whatever their initial position had been, it could have been modified in the face of new arguments or circumstances, whether they arose during the investigation of the case or in the act of the oral trial”. But he emphasizes that this extreme is not the one that was in question in the appeal.
It adds that the right to be tried by an impartial court is not satisfied with the ability of a judge to modify an initial position that is unfavorable to the accused.
And he clarifies that this fundamental right requires that the members of the court appear at the plenary act “unrelated to any prior position on the essential issues that have to be aired there, devoid of any kind of evaluative prejudice.” “If the metaphor were appropriate: the game must start with the score at zero,” the judges point out.
The appellant Anna Simó denounced the lack of impartiality of the president of the court, José Luis Barrientos Pacho, and magistrate Ramos Rubio, rapporteur of the sentence. Precisely the challenges of both were rejected, and they were part of the Chamber that admitted the three complaints that, successively, gave rise to the formation of the case, and also of the one that dismissed the appeals filed against those decisions.
In said resolutions, particularly in the order dated March 16, 2017 that dismissed one of the appeals, both magistrates would have explicitly adopted, according to the appellant, a position on several issues in the case, which In his opinion, it would suppose an unequivocal “prejudice” in relation to all or most of the defensive arguments, separating them from the required objective impartiality.
