The relatives of a girl victim of continued sexual abuse by an officer of the Ministry of the Interior in Buey Arriba, province of Granma, have been waiting for almost a month for a response to the appeal they filed against the sentence of three years of correctional labor without confinement that the Municipal Court issued against the aggressor.
The benevolent condemnation Michael Solano Arevalo, 41 years old, proven author of the crime of sexual abuse of a continuous nature to the four-year-old minor, was challenged by her family, who reported that they have been waiting for more than 20 days for the resolution of the appeal.
According to a note from Martí News, the ruling of the judges of the Popular Municipal Court of Buey Arriba occurred on February 20, 2024, but the sentence was notified on March 29, according to the document obtained by the press.
Article 630.2 of the Law 143 of Criminal Procedure approved by the Cuban regime in 2021 establishes that, once the appeal is received, the court that issues the sentence has a period of three days to send it to the Provincial Court, and the Provincial Court will call for a new appeal hearing, which, presumably , It is not performed.
Yelenis Pinilla, grandmother of the abused minor, reported Martí News his disagreement with the sentence against Solano, whom he identifies as a State Security agent.
“I think that sentence was so embarrassing! Here in Cuba, a criminal kills a cow and is sentenced to eight to nine years in prison. "So a criminal who abuses a girl is given three years of correctional work without confinement," the woman stressed.
Pinilla maintains that this occurred “because of the corruption that exists here in this country of judges and prosecutors, which is impressive and sad and because the criminal is an agent of the Cuban State Security, those are the ones they recruit, the major criminals, that type of people is the one they recruit.
"This town is small, and as they say 'small town, big hell' and it is known that the criminal is an agent," said the grandmother.
The Municipal Court of Buey Arriba sentenced the sexual offender to three years of deprivation of liberty, but -despite the seriousness of the crime committed- the sentence was subsidized by equal time of correctional work without confinement, as stated in the court ruling.
In statements to Martí News, Alain Espinosa, lawyer at the Cubalex legal advice center, questioned the sentence imposed on Solano, which he described as “considerably lenient.”
“They were benevolent, even within the criminal process, because at all times they kept the person free,” said the jurist. “This proves how the political will of the State is more inclined to criminalize and sanction effective exercises of Human Rights, such as freedom of expression, than to pursue criminal conduct that is serious for society, such as this crime. of sexual abuse of a minor”.
Espinosa said that regarding “the sentence and the way in which the process was processed, it is evident that this person was not deprived of liberty at any time. In fact, the precautionary measure that was applied to him throughout the process was an obligation contracted in the minutes, that is, to go to a specific place that could be a police unit, to sign once a week or once every 15 days. .
The Cubalex jurist pointed out that this procedural action gave the accused “the possibility of evading criminal responsibility or of hindering the criminal process by trying, in some way, to influence the girl or her mother and the rest of the loved ones so that they falsify their identity. testimony".
Likewise, he assured that the court failed to appreciate several aggravating circumstances in the process and “should have increased the maximum limit of the planned sanctioning framework by up to half. This means that, instead of having a sanctioning framework between two and five years of deprivation of liberty, the sanctioning framework would have to have been between two and seven and a half years of deprivation of liberty, with the possibility of having imposed a sanction that “was closer to this maximum limit than to the minimum limit.”
According to Espinosa, imposing on the accused a sanction that is less than five years of deprivation of liberty, allowed the judges to subsidize the sentence for correctional work without confinement. “We see how the tendency to guarantee a certain degree of impunity to the person responsible for a crime as serious as this one and which gives him the possibility of committing it again crimes of this type”, he warned.
The accused, who pleaded not guilty to the charges, was not prohibited from approaching the victim.
According to the court's ruling, on a date prior to July 9, 2023, the minor, who had sometimes been under the care of the aggressor's wife, entered her home alone, on Celia Aguilar Street, without number, between April 9 and Ignacio Agramonte, in the Vitalio Acuña cast.
Taking advantage of the fact that the girl was not accompanied by any adult family member, the offender took her to a room, stripped her of her clothes and sexually abused her.
The prosecutor Deilenis Tornés Beltrán He stated that the abuser carried out his “libidinous” acts repeatedly, without being able to specify exact dates. The complaint of the assault was made by the minor's mother, Iriannis Contino Pinilla.
During the investigative process, the girl “explained in an accurate and safe manner each of the actions carried out by the defendant, she detailed the place chosen by him to satisfy his libidinous instincts, specifically in the bedroom of the home, she described the moment in which she was targeted. of these acts and pointed out the places where he touched her," the court document indicated.
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