Monday April 24, 2023 | 8:41 p.m.
Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner asked this Monday the Federal Criminal Cassation Chamber to annul the sentence of six years in prison and disqualification imposed on her in the trial for the “Road case” and to order her acquittal, after argue that the ruling against him contains “factual and regulatory arbitrariness” and constitutes “a case of enormous institutional gravity.”
For his part, prosecutor Diego Luciani also appealed and asked that Cassation aggravate the sentence for the Vice President and other defendants and also sentence them for the crime of illicit association.
This last charge was discarded in the majority vote of the judges of the Federal Oral Court 2 Jorge Gorini and Rodrigo Giménez Uriburu with dissent in this aspect of the third magistrate, Andrés Basso, when on December 6 the Vice President was sentenced for alleged “administration fraudulent” with “perpetual disqualification from holding public office”.
The verdict “does not have direct evidence,” warned the former president’s lawyers, Carlos Beraldi and Ary Llernovoy, in the 394-page appeal brief presented this Monday.
“We are in the presence of a situation of enormous institutional gravity, as we have exposed since the beginning of this process, in which an attempt has been made to present as criminal acts of government that are absolutely legitimate and not justiciable, carried out by three constitutional governments, elected democratically by popular vote,” they added.
The sentence “was based on absolutely arbitrary considerations devoid of the slightest logical, factual and legal support,” the lawyers warned.
During the trial that lasted three years, “the state of innocence” of the former president was ratified for alleged crimes with the award of national public works to the companies of Lázaro Báez in Santa Cruz between 2003 and 2015.
And they recalled that the TOF2 rejected “more than 80 percent of the evidence offered” by the defense, in particular “unavoidable” expertise in these trials and that this decision was ratified by the Court of Appeal “made up of the judges who visited the Fifth de Olivos”, was remarked in reference to visits by the chambermaids Mariano Borinsky and Gustavo Hornos to former president Mauricio Macri at that time.
Those same decisions were confirmed “later by the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation – partially made up of the judges proposed by Rodríguez Simón” which took more than three years and declared the proposals “inadmissible” almost at the end of the oral debate. –
They also maintained that “the guarantee of the natural judge was violated, since the acting magistrates, both in the preliminary stage and in the oral instance, showed an ostensible lack of independence and impartiality regarding the case and the parties.”
The judges “assumed an accusatory position that is not consistent with the impartial and equidistant role that should guide the jurisdictional work.”
In the trial “the duty of objectivity of the Public Prosecutor’s Office was violated, while its representatives acted guided by purposes that have nothing to do with the proper service of administration of justice and the application of the law,” the lawyers added in relation to prosecutors Luciani and Sergio Mola.
Source: Telam
