The Motril law court has sentenced a resident of Granada to 22 months in prison and ordered him to pay compensation of 749 euros after he left a hotel in Calahonda without paying after staying there for a month. He even made good use of their catering facilities.

The offender has several other convictions for this sort of crime. However, as the sentence is under 2 years, it is automatically suspended.

So, why ‘double whammy’? Well, that just refers to the snail pace of the Spanish judicial system. The hotel was conned out of this money in 2007! While the bogged down system drags its judicial backside, the hotel… or indeed any victim of crime, has to wait years to get any kind of redress.

Surely, this has to change. As we have often seen amongst these pages, a crime can often see no justice whatsoever, all because the offence becomes ‘timed-out’ and no longer prosecutable. The question is, what kind of message does this send to the victims… and indeed the offenders?