Two national police officers sentenced for illegally assaulting and detaining a man who was carrying a baby in his arms

The events, according to the ruling of the Madrid High Court, to which elDiario.es has had access, occurred at the gates of the Aranjuez mixed police station in July 2018. The man, who had a history of threatening an agent with a Screwdriver a decade ago in the same town, he had called the Police and the Civil Guard to announce that he wanted to denounce a policeman for a previous altercation. He denounced, without any record that it is true, that he had “strangled” him during an arrest some time before.

Once in front of the police station, as proven by Justice, the man and the national police officer whom he wanted to denounce exchanged a few words. Then his partner appeared, put her ten-month-old son in his arms, and when they were leaving there the police assault began. The agent, according to the Madrid Court, grabbed him by the neck and arms “taking advantage of his status as an agent of authority and using excessive and disproportionate force” while he was carrying the baby in his arms.

It was then that the other convicted national police officer, a room operator, went to help his partner and pulled the arm of the man’s partner, who was trying to help him, “using excessive and disproportionate force” according to the judges. Both the first police officer and the couple suffered injuries, the most serious being those of the man who was going to denounce, and everything was recorded on video by a woman who witnessed the events. The man was taken to the dungeon and was detained.

At the trial all three sat on the bench. The Prosecutor’s Office initially requested fines for the two agents for minor offenses of injury and one year in prison for the man attacked for a crime of resistance. The police officers even requested two years in prison for him and two more for her then partner, but she was not charged in the trial: in the proceedings prior to the trial, the court did not admit the accusation made against the woman .

The result is a conviction for the two police officers and an acquittal for the man attacked. The Provincial Court of Madrid has imposed five years in prison for illegal detention for the agent who was the main actor in the altercation, and both he and his partner at the police station are fined 480 euros in addition to being sentenced to compensate the two affected. The first agent, in addition, is disqualified from acting as a police officer for eight years. Both agents, according to sources in the case, have appealed their sentences before the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid.

They used “disproportionate force”

Both the national police officer and the man attacked made it clear at the trial that this was not their first meeting. In addition to the arrest mentioned by the complainant, the policeman stated that he had been involved in an altercation in a health center, and that shortly before that day they had met in a park where he was with his family. In the trial he tried to convince the court that that day, at the gates of the police station, the complainant came to threaten him with something related to his relatives. He also assured that he had verbalized his intention to “settle accounts” with him.

The three magistrates who have judged the case do not give credibility to the agent’s version and his complaint of threats and maintain that both the attack and the subsequent arrest were police abuse. “It has not been proven that he attacked the agents or assaulted them in any way, nor that he uttered threatening expressions of an evil that constituted a crime,” says the sentence.

However, it does consider that the policeman arrested him “without there being any legal basis for the arrest, a circumstance that the policeman who agreed to arrest him and take him to the police station as a detainee could not ignore when he knew what really happened and that there was no legal cause, acting with clear abuse of his status as a police officer in an obviously disproportionate and arbitrary action.”

That he tried to leave there is not a legal infraction, there is no evidence that he said he was going to “settle scores” nor that he alluded to the policeman’s family. “There was no actual discussion,” the court states. He cannot be sentenced, they understand, the assaulted because he “resisted the arrest that he understood was not appropriate.” In this sense, the video that the magistrates were able to see in the trial makes clear “clearly” the use “of disproportionate force by both agents.”

The value of a police officer’s statement

The other agent is convicted of the injuries he caused to the woman but not for the illegal detention of the man. He acted, the court understands, motivated by the professional intention of helping his partner but without knowing that he was perpetrating an illegal detention. “It was not he who decided on his arrest and his admission to the police station cells, unduly depriving him of his freedom,” he adds.

One of the agents, sentenced to a fine for the crime of injuring the woman, was defended in the trial by the lawyer who usually works with the Jupol union, who in this interview He affirmed that with this resolution “the principle of authority of the police is being violated” by understanding that they have been sentenced for defending themselves against an attack.

The validity of the statement of a police officer in a trial where he has been implicated is something that is also addressed by the Provincial Court of Madrid. “It is not acceptable in line with principle that police demonstrations have to constitute full and objective proof of the destructive charge of the presumption of innocence by itself,” say the magistrates. “Any overestimation of the procedural value of police statements would inevitably lead to the degradation of the presumption of innocence of the subjects affected by them,” they add, citing what the Supreme Court already said in 2010 when he convicted a jewel thief from Salou.

“The statement of the agents of the authority does not enjoy, far from it, a presumption of veracity, but their testimony must be calibrated under the crucible with which the testimony of any witness is examined,” said the same Court of Madrid in 2013 when he sentenced the man who, in this case, is declared the victim of police abuse in Aranjuez for threatening an agent.