BARCELONA-. The footballer’s defense Dani Alves asked foruspend the trial in which he is accused of sexually assaulting a young woman at the Sutton nightclub in Barcelona because he considers that a “parallel trial in the media” violated his right to the presumption of innocence.
His lawyer, Inés Guardiola, argued this in the processing of issues prior to the start of the trial that began this Monday in the Barcelona Court, and the court will decide it after a recess.
Guardiola has delivered to the court some 450 pieces of news about the case, which in his opinion have represented “a constant trickle to present Mr. Alves as a sexual aggressor, leading to a public condemnation.”
The defense also considers the right to an impartial judge violated because it believes that the judge who tried the case was “contaminated by the media.”
The lawyer put forward other arguments to try to suspend the trial, such as that Alves supposedly did not have access to the information regarding the investigation on him from the first moment and that when he was arrested his lawyer had “less than two hours” to find out the research and prepare the statement.
Guardiola has stated that Alves “never had the opportunity to defend himself effectively during the investigation phase”, sees his right to a process with all guarantees violated and believes that the treatment given to him by the court has been unfairly differentiated.
The lawyer also presented to the court a certificate from the Tax Agency from 2023, which shows that Alves has a negative balance of €20,000 in the account and a judicial seizure of about 50,000, and has also challenged several of the evidence presented by the accusation.
Source: Europa Press
