According to the information offered yesterday by the Supreme Court, The Chamber partially upheld the appeal filed by the defense of the convicted woman against the sentence of the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands which, like the one issued by A Court of the Jury of the Provincial Court of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, imposed a sentence of 17 years in prison for a crime of murder with treachery.
The court now issued a conviction for a crime of homicide, not murder, considering that in this case the treachery has not fully occurred, so it replaces this aggravation by abuse of superiority, which entails a reduction in the pain.
According to the proven facts, on August 4, 2018, at around 10:00 a.m., the defendant, with the intention of ending the young man’s life, stabbed him with a large knife, at his home, in the Cabo Blanco, where the woman had gone with her minor daughter. The first stabbing occurred in the upper area of the victim’s back, who had gone to the bathroom and was unprepared, but later he was inflicted with many more, according to the investigation.
The defendant, not caring about the victim’s condition, went home where she showered and changed her clothes, and later went to the airport and bought a ticket for the next day with the intention of leaving the country for Cuba. But she was stopped by the Civil Guard before she could manage to escape.
The victim was transferred to the Hospital Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria, in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, where he underwent surgery, dying as a result of a hypovolemic hemorrhagic shock produced by multiple stab wounds inflicted by the accused.
The Chamber considers that the proven fact, based on the jury’s verdict, is that there was a first stab wound in the upper area of the back while the victim, who had gone to the bathroom, unprepared, was later followed by many others and that some of they determined the death.
It adds that it declared a treacherous beginning of the aggression proven but not that that beginning already marked an irrecoverable – totally or almost totally – defense capacity or generated a determining and nullifying imbalance of the defense possibilities; nor did the treacherous component persist.
“What could have been a fatal result produced with treachery ended or could end up being transformed into a malicious death in a setting other than a treachery that had vanished,” says the Court, which indicates that the treacherous behavior was concatenated by new stripped-down acts of aggression already of the treacherous element; although a superiority persists (based both on the weapon, as well as on those treacherous preliminaries).
“The proven fact is compatible with that hypothesis that, driven by the presumption of innocence, we have to consider as possible,” the Chamber concludes.
