The Provincial Court of Santa Cruz de Tenerife has upheld the appeal filed by two defendants accused of stealing 100 kilos of avocados on a farm in Tacoronte, considering that at most it would be a minor theft but that in any case it would have prescribed.
In the first instance, a Criminal Court imposed a sentence of eight months in prison and the payment of 450 euros, the amount at which the allegedly stolen fruit was valued.
On the one hand, the Chamber does not believe that there is sufficient and objective evidence of the amount of avocados stolen as a weighing was not carried out at the time the merchandise was seized.
By being considered a minor theft offense, the requirements to consider it prescribed would be met and any criminal liability would be extinguished.
In their appeal, the defendants requested to be acquitted or that at most they be considered perpetrators of a minor theft offense, as happened, and questioned the expert report prepared, alleging that its results led to defenselessness.
They maintained that during the process there was no conclusive evidence and that there was no theft, but that the events derived from a lease whose contract had expired, which generated a dispute to which the other defendant was alien.
They denounced contradictions such as that the owner of the farm said that the agents had seen a man collect the avocados and put them in a van, when in reality the defendant used a bucket with which he took them to his nearby house.
One of the agents could not specify if the trees had been recently cut because it was an open field in which there were footprints "everywhere" and it was questioned how it was possible that he had quantified the amount at 100 kilos without being an expert.
However, when the judge insisted on recounting what happened, the agent said that both the footprints and the pruning seemed recent, an insistence that according to the defendants implies the loss of impartiality and a violation of fundamental rights.
Argument rejected by the Court in that issues that were fundamental in the case were not addressed and that everything was limited to trying to make the witness more specific to clarify what happened.
