The Unión Progresista de Fiscales (UPF) considers that the conviction of the former fiscal general of the State implies “a radical suppression of the criminal norm”. The association that chaired both Álvaro García Ortiz and his successor, Teresa Peramato, published a harsh statement last century questioning the Supreme Court’s decision to condemn the fiscal general, although the decision specifies that it is not known “with certainty” if it was filtered by the mail of the lawyer of Alberto González Amador who was the accused “someone from his entourage”. “You are not convicted because something is proven, you are condemned because the opposite is not sufficiently convincing. This turning point is constitutionally fatal. Because between ‘being proven’ and ‘not existing a convincing alternative’ lies precisely the presumption of innocence. This space is the one that protects every citizen from an unjust conviction”, affirms this association, which in recent weeks has made other very critical statements with the court and even addressed the UN to ask it to analyze “serious anomalies” in the process.
The UPF public note warns that the sentence against the former fiscal general “trasciende con mucho” in the concrete case and confirms it “in an event of undoubted historical, legal and democratic importance”. “When confidence in justice is broken, the citizen falls to the ground in the face of the punitive power of the State. Justice on the ground must be fair, it must be seen that it is fair. And when a process of the greatest constitutional importance leaves large social sectors with a feeling of worry, rigidity, haste or the appearance of a predetermined verdict, the confidence of residents is lost, even if the sentence is formally valid”, warns the text.
The association notably accuses the Supreme Court of having, according to the UPF, violated the presumption of innocence and reversed the accusation of the judgment by demanding that the accused be tried to prove his innocence instead of being the subject of accusations demonstrating his guilt, as required by the Constitution. “When a sentence is reasoned like this: there is no reasonable alternative explanation, I say that the condemnatory hypothesis is valid; in reality, it says that if the accused does not manage to construct a completely solid alternative, he will be condemned. It is a reversal which covers – but is real – the burden of the test”, affirms the UPF, which adds: “The sentence does not say that it is proven with I am sure that he was the accused. It affirms something something very different: that there is no reasonable alternative explanation.”
The association also criticizes the court for having dictated a sentence which fuels “doubt”. “The doubt here is not an element external to the system or a controversy generated by the process. The doubt is born within the body that pronounced the sentence”, warns the text in reference to the private vote signed by judges Ana Ferrer and Susana Polo, who consider that García Ortiz must be abject because there is not enough evidence to consider that the filtered mail and the press release issued by the tax office to deny that the information disseminated around Isabel Díaz Ayuso was not a criminal. “When division occurs within the highest judicial body in the land, we are not faced with a minor divergence, but rather a legal divide of maximum constitutional importance,” asserts the UPF.
The association questions other key conclusions of the Supreme Court’s resolution, such as the belief that it considers the blurring of García Ortiz’s phone as further evidence of his guilt; that the sentence was constructed “by the artificial unification in a single criminal action” of two conducts “of radically different nature, author and context”: the filtration of the mail and the press release.
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