Saturday January 28, 2023 | 8:30 a.m.
Throughout his plea, which lasted a little over an hour, the lawyer for the eight defendants for the crime of Fernando Báez Sosa, Hugo Tomei, emphasized several axes. He said that “there was never a plan to kill”, that the defendants did not prove the intent and that “they had no dimension of what had happened.” He also considered that what happened would fall under the figure of homicide in a fight, but before that he asked for the acquittal of all the detainees “because the fact is not proven.” In addition, he questioned the statements of some witnesses.
In particular, the lawyer mentioned the testimonies of Alejandro “Chiqui” Muñoz, the nightclub’s security chief at the time of the murder, and Tomás Bidonde, a young man who was in the nightclub that night of January 18, 2020 and witnessed the event.
Muñoz, when Dolores was summoned, gave his account of what happened shortly after he forcibly removed Máximo Thomsen from the dance venue: “When I get to the door (of Le Brique) I see all the ‘rugby’ and I see They take turns hitting Fernando: they tried to separate their friends and leave them five or six meters away. Some covered their friends and others hit him (Fernando). One who was wearing a white shirt with a bun (N. de la R. for the photos is Matías Benicelli) hit Fernando and Fernando never got up again. They kicked her constantly. The one who hit him the most was the boy I took out: Thomsen. I concentrated on him because, look, I’m big, but I couldn’t contain him”.
In his turn, Bidonde also referred to Thomsen: “He kicked the boy in the head who later died,” he said and highlighted the “aggressiveness” of the blows that he described as “punching.” “Like when you kick a soccer ball with your fingertips,” he described.
Tomei sowed doubts about the details of both, pointing out the position of each of them at the time of the crime: using a sketch incorporated into the case, he indicated that the witnesses were at the entrance to the nightclub and from there they observed the beating. However, the lawyer argued, “other witnesses said they were standing at the door of Le Brique and said they could not see, for example, the girl who performed CPR on him.”
“It is impossible that from the door of Le Brique it can be seen with the clarity that they have stated. ‘He punched him in the head,’ they said… ”, he insisted and added ironically: “Sometimes I thought he was in a trial where the nuclear man with the bionic eye was here”.
Specifically about Bidonde, the defender limited: “I am not going to say that he is lying, but that he did not see what he said he saw. And it is likely that what you have seen was obtained unconsciously from the television media and social networks that endlessly passed the videos. In this sense, he said that “if there is something that witnesses have, it is a mind that is weak and that can be completed with a lot of information and believe that it is their own, but it arises from social postulates, from prejudices, from other conditions” . On this basis, he reflected: “The problem with all this is how all the records in the file have proliferated and how the witnesses, unconsciously, were assuming a position that has as its counterpart a sentence that is difficult to make.”
For Tomei, this “incomparable media imprint” that the case took “has transformed” it into “a paradigm of what should not happen”, with “hours and hours of videos, records of the file exposed on social networks, on TV”.
“There is no question that all the evidence is tainted. The sentence that can be handed down will try to come close, I know the love for the law that judges have, but they cannot get out of a matter like this. The State should have been responsible or answer for these issues, ”he rounded off.
The reading of the verdict will be on February 6.
