A guilty verdict was returned to Luis Alberto Villa for the crime of her partner, the teacher from La Plata Maria Lujan Alva. The citizen jury unanimously found him guilty of the crime of homicide aggravated by the bondcrime that it is paid with life imprisonment and for which you will not be able to access any benefit of early release before completing 50 years behind bars.
The 12 jurors endorsed the hypothesis of the case raised by the trial prosecutor Victoria Huergo who for two hours made a punctilious, medullous plea, with clear language and convincingly exposing each of the evidence that from his gaze pointed to the craftsman as responsible for the death.
After the guilty verdict was announced, the large audience that followed the oral and public debate burst into tears and dismissed the jury shouting “thank you” and with a loud and thunderous applause that resounded in every corner of the La Plata Criminal Court, which at 00:50 hours was almost empty.
Then it was the turn of the recognition of the work of the prosecutor who received another closed and louder applause to the cry of “Thank you Huergo!” y “What a woman, what a woman!” while receiving a hug from friends of the victim and her parents.
During the more than 12 hours that the last day of the debate lasted, dozens of friends and relatives of the murdered woman remained inside the building and on the entrance steps of Calle 8 between 56 and 57.
The event occurred on February 4, 2019, when Villa denounced that, upon arriving at his house at 79 between 8 and 9 in the town of Villa ElviraHe found his wife hanging from a ceiling beam.
According to his version, he took it down, crossed the body through a window. Once in the dining room, he tried to perform resuscitation maneuvers (CPR) but was unsuccessful and asked for help. However, forensic experts observed that the victim “he had three blows to the face, presumably made with a fist”.
“The characteristics of the strangulation and the groove that the rope had left in the woman’s neck were not compatible with those of a suspended body”, the report noted. For this reason, the alleged femicide was arrested based on the result of the autopsy, added to the testimony of several neighbors who claimed to have heard the couple argue before the woman’s death.
In her opening statement, the prosecutor pointed out that the defendant “He killed her and simulated the suicide that only closed him, not the family and experts. I would have liked to bring you a direct witness or a camera that has filmed everything, but that does not mean that we cannot reconstruct the fact, the witnesses that they will declare have the same value, this was not a suicide, it was a homicide carried out by a ‘jealous dominant’ who cut off Luján’s freedom, it was another death from sexist violence “.
Huergo asked for conviction for homicide aggravated by the link in the context of gender violence, but the jury partially shared that look and applied the aggravating circumstance of the link. In any case, the penalty to be served is the same, the maximum of the current Penal Code.
Next week the technical judge Andres Vitali will announce the date on which the judgment of the case will be known. After the verdict was reached, the magistrate thanked the jury for his citizen commitment, with justice and with the republic.
