The Prosecutor’s Office, although it considers the facts to be proven, has agreed to reduce its sentence from six to three months and ten days in prison, by applying the circumstance of undue delay because “it cannot happen that we are in 2021 judging events of 2014, with no complexity ”.
The defense, for its part, requests the free acquittal because the deputy “did not participate in these events” and asked to consider as a highly qualified mitigating factor for being “very serious” the undue delays with “more than five years of inactivity.”
In his statement, which occurred at the end of the test at the request of the defense, Rodríguez stressed that he participated in the demonstration but not in the altercations that took place in front of the Lagunera cathedral, because “it was 500 meters away” at the beginning of the He marched and when he reached that area “it was quite obvious that the events had already occurred.” That is why he wanted to insist that “it is false” that he had kicked anyone. “I have never attacked an agent, it is impossible that this would have happened,” stressed the deputy from United We Can, assuring that if he had been there he would have looked good: “I am two meters tall.”
When asked by the prosecutor about why there is then an agent accusing him of assaults, Rodríguez stressed that “there is a police setup with the intention of recriminating certain visible faces of the island’s social activism [Tenerife]».
The State security forces and bodies have, as he reported, “certain lists with the most visible profiles of social movements”, so that “when there is a demonstration, a posteriori, based on those lists (…)” it acts. «It is said this and this person, well come on, as we have your data we put it ad hoc, with shoehorn, in a process with the intention of criminalizing the protest. It happens with unfortunate normality and that is the reason why I am in this case, “he argued.
Rodríguez insisted that “there is no objective evidence in this entire process beyond the mere statement of a police officer.” And that, he said, “has a conclusion for the population”: “just the word of a policeman is enough to subject you to a judicial ordeal and an eventual conviction is produced.”
He warned the judges, however, that if this occurs he will resort to the Constitutional and Europe.
The main evidence against Rodríguez is the testimony of the agent, who explained yesterday to the Chamber that the moment of greatest tension in front of the cathedral saw the defendant “trying to access where the minister was” when “at a given moment” he received a “voluntary kick” in the left knee, allegedly by Rodríguez.
“It was not a kick that prevented me from continuing to work,” said the agent, who in fact denied being incapacitated for five days, since that same night he was fine.
When asked why he did not stop him then he replied: “I considered that trying to catch him or prevent him from leaving would have been worse than holding the line.” Nor did he stop him when he went to the police station where those arrested were: “It was quiet there.” The police officer remembered Rodríguez physically of attending demonstrations with normal behavior but he did not know his identity, it was his colleagues who identified him because they knew his name.
The person in charge of the police operation, who gave a statement before the allegedly assaulted agent, explained that he did not see Rodríguez in the altercations and that “although he could not be detained at that time, he could be recognized for being habitual of demonstrations, altercations and attacks on the public force ”, which, however, he could not detail.
And the doctor who treated the agent in the emergency room also stated that he told her that he had received “several punches and kicks” and that he had pain in his knee, but could not prove that the ailment was the result of a specific injury.
If the trial was seen for sentence yesterday. In the networks the messages for and against his innocence multiplied. Among the last ones, those of the United Nations Ministers We Can Ione Belarra and Irene Montero.
