In another article we quoted the words of a citizen who pointed out that the word of a simple citizen is far below the word of a police officer and the next story appears to demonstrate that it is not only their word that is different.
The story begins in 2006 with the Catalan regional police, Los Mossos d’Escuadra, arresting a Romanian man who they had misidentified as the offender in a hold up. Whilst in custody they beat up and tortured the man, which was caught on the police station’s own CCTV cameras.
Before long the four policemen were facing trial and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. In 2009, still without having set foot inside a prison, they appealed before the Supreme Court, but their arguments were thrown out. However, this maximum judicial body did reduce the sentence to four years, six months and expulsion from the police force.
The previous month, two other policemen from Los Mossos we also found guilty of causing bodily harm, attacks upon moral integrity and disproportional force during an arrest – they were sentenced to a 6-month suspended sentence and two years suspended from service. Los Mossos, as you can imagine, have a bit of a reputation for brutality.
The then Regional Government, headed by the socialists, decided to go for a pardon, thanks to a ‘wave of support’ from within this regional police force. The reason? The prison sentence had not been ‘sufficiently pondered.’ After the looming regional elections, the new administration (CiU) embraced this posture.
In the meantime, the Romanian, back in his own country considered that the four policemen were thugs with police badges: “I don’t like the idea of anybody going to prison because it breaks up families, but these policemen… they turned up at the trial smiling and joking amongst themselves.”
To cut a long story short, in February 2012, the Central Government agreed to award a partial pardon to a prison sentence of less than two years, so that they did not actually have to do time in prison – less that two years is automatically a suspended sentence. The regional judicial authorities were far from happy and decided that the four men had to go to prison, regardless of the length of sentence, because of the “social alarm” that such a decision was causing.
The Government, using a law from 1870, granted a second pardon, reducing the sentence to a 7,200-euro fine and suspension of service rather than an expulsion from it.
The judicial authorities were very, very unhappy with this and 200 judges signed a letter that qualified the Government’s decision as “arbitrary and political.” The Government responded that the judges had no right to interfere in areas that did not concern them.
Editorial Note: The four policemen had every reason to smile and joke as they appeared before the judge, it appears.
(News: Cataluña, Spain)