They stress that the judges will resolve independently while waiting for the TS to establish jurisprudence
MADRID, 22 Nov. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The judicial associations have recalled this Tuesday that the criteria that the prosecutors will follow after the decree of the State Attorney General’s Office (FGE) in relation to the revisions of the sentence by the law of ‘only yes is yes’ is not binding for the magistrates, remembering in this sense that they make their decisions independently.
The State Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz, issued a decree on Monday for prosecutors to give “a uniform response” to the reviews of final sentences caused by the entry into force of the law, establishing that they will not be modified when the sentence imposed can be dictated with the new penal framework, which would avoid an “automatic” reduction of sentences.
The executive member of the Professional Association of the Magistracy (APM) Juan José Carbonero has explained, in statements to Europa Press, that although the judges must be “to everything that the parties report, the normal thing is that the reports” of the Public Prosecutor “They are not binding except in certain cases, such as in the case of provisional measures of imprisonment.”
“It is normal for the FGE, not only in this case, to issue decrees or circulars in which it establishes a position,” said Carbonero, who has recognized that, “beyond the content” of the aforementioned decree, what “he calls attention” is that the criterion adopted goes in a “different direction from what” had been reported in some cases by prosecutors.
The president of the Independent Judicial Forum (FJI), Fernando Portillo, has expressed himself in a similar way, making it clear that those who “have to resolve” the revisions of the rulings “are the judges.” “The rest are only mandatory instructions for prosecutors, but they do not bind judges and have no legal validity,” he pointed out.
However, Portillo acknowledges that this FGE guideline may mean that “from now on there will be more opposition to sentence reviews than up to now.” “But in the end, the one who makes the decision is each judge in his court. Nothing necessarily changes. There may be some conflict, but it is an internal matter that does not transcend the judge’s decision,” he added.
For his part, the spokesman for the Francisco de Vitoria Judicial Association (AJFV), Jorge Fernández Vaquero, has assured that they do not have “a position as such” regarding an instruction marked by the FGE, which has “considered it appropriate to issue a decree that It’s within their duties.”
“It is normal that he wants to make sure that the actions of the Prosecutor’s Office respond to unity criteria. We have nothing to say, it is part of the norm. Perhaps the disparity in the sentences is what has motivated this. It is a decree as a provisional solution, urgently, before drawing up a technical instruction that the Board of Prosecutors needs”, he detailed in statements to Europa Press.
Finally, the spokesperson for Judges and Judges for Democracy (JJpD), Ascensión Martín, pointed out that the FGE decree “only binds prosecutors.” “We are still waiting for the jurisprudential indications of the Supreme Court,” she recalled.
The aforementioned decree states that, “as a general rule, the review of final sentences will not proceed when the sentence imposed in the sentence is also likely to be imposed in accordance with the new legal framework resulting from the reform”, specifying that “adaptation will be avoided of the penalties previously imposed in arithmetic proportion to the new punitive framework”.
Thus, it indicates that the review will only proceed “when the penalty effectively imposed exceeds in the abstract that which would correspond to be imposed in application of the precepts of the new criminal legislation.”
The tax sources consulted by this news agency explain that these guidelines imply that, for example, if a person was sentenced to 3 years for sexual crimes and the ‘law of only yes is yes’ allows sentencing that same conduct with between 2 and 6 years, the 3 years can be maintained because they are still within the criminal range that the new law has designed.
