The special charge against Yacine Kanga, the man accused of murdering a priest in Algeciras (Cádiz) on January 25, 2023, will appeal the ruling of the National Court that acquitted him.
The ruling upheld the full defense of mental disorder, although it ordered him to be placed in a psychiatric facility for a maximum of 30 years.
Lawyer Manuel Barbera explained, in statements to Europa Press, that the ruling reflects the assumption that the accused, who in this case is the convict, has a complete defense, “meaning that at the time the events occurred he was not aware of what he was doing.”
He added: “This contradicts the arguments that we were clinging to, all the popular accusations and the prosecution, because it is true that he had a change in voluntary ability, but this was not completely invalidated, as he had some conscious knowledge of what he was doing.”
“The court tends to assume that his voluntary capacity has been completely lost and for this reason acquitted him, even though it applies detention for a period not exceeding 30 years,” Manuel Barbera explained.
In this sense, he indicated that the prosecution’s intention is to appeal the ruling supporting its arguments, “that is, the presence of a psychological change in this case does not mean for him that he did not know what he was doing, but rather that he had a certain ability to understand what he was doing, especially in previous actions, which was in the stage of extremism that this man had before the actions he committed.”
It is worth noting that in the ruling of the National Court, published by Europa Press, the Criminal Chamber notes that after examining the various expert reports made on Kanga, along with the rest of the evidence analyzed at the trial, the accused presented at the time of committing the acts “a picture of the commission of schizophrenic acts with acute psychotic decompensation with emotional and behavioral inapplication that abolished his intellectual and volitional capacities, and therefore the estimate exempts her from Article 20.1 of the Penal Code.”