JAÉN 30 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The jury has found guilty of murder with the aggravating circumstances of treachery and cruelty to the man tried in the Jaén Court for punching and kicking to death a woman in Linares (Jaén) with whom he was in an intermittent relationship.
The jury, which began deliberating shortly before noon, has also considered the mitigating circumstance of temporary mental disorder and has rejected the aggravating circumstance of gender that the Public Prosecutor’s Office had been requesting from the beginning.
With the verdict read, the Prosecutor’s Office and private prosecution have requested that a sentence of 22 years in prison be imposed, while the defense has requested that the minimum sentence be applied, which in practice is equivalent to 20 years in prison.
The presiding magistrate will now be in charge of handing down the sentence and imposing the penalty according to the decision adopted by the popular court of the jury, which on this occasion was made up of five men and four women.
The events already tried date back to February 2021 when the victim, aged 57, went to the house of the accused, aged 47, to help him settle in since he had just moved to Linares.
It was around 3:47 a.m. on February 3 when a call was received in the 091 room reporting the presence of the body of a woman on Baños Street, next to some containers, and that she had symptoms of having been brutally attacked. It was the garbage collection workers who alerted the Local Police and they, in turn, notified the National Police.
The agents observed a trail of blood leading towards Santiago Street and after following the trail, the agents entered a block at number 34 Santiago Street. Once there, they verified that the blood led to an elevator and, specifically, to a second floor. The police knocked on the door but no one opened it, so they requested the presence of the Firefighters to force entry.
Once inside they found the detainee with blood-stained clothes. It was then that he told the agents that, indeed, it had been him.
During the first session of the trial that began this Monday, the accused denied having had a relationship with the victim and declared that Benita “deserved” what happened for “casting black magic on her,” although when asked by his lawyer he also said he was “very sorry.”
He said that it all started when the victim called him a “faggot” because of the state of the house. “It bothered me that he called me a faggot because of how he had the house. I was not a stuffed animal for anyone,” said the accused, who also claimed to have had mental health problems for 14 years aggravated by alcohol consumption.
For their part, the forensic experts who examined him determined at the trial that the accused “knew and knew” what he was doing at the time of the events, although they did not rule out that he could have suffered “an impulse control crisis” and stressed that At the time of the examination, the accused was “normal” and “did not present any type of pathology.”
With all this, and having heard in court the testimonies of seven witnesses, 14 police officers and the corresponding experts, the jury has supported with its verdict the approach of the Prosecutor’s Office and the private prosecution, although they have also included the mitigating circumstance of temporary mental disorder, as and as the defense had stated, which from the beginning advocated a conviction for murder.