The First Section of the Provincial Court of Las Palmas has acquitted the sergeant of the Seprona in Lanzarote, Gloria Moreno, of the crimes of documentary falsehood and slander for which she was tried last October. The sentence, which was announced this Monday, considers that the crimes imputed by the Public Prosecutor's Office and the private prosecution, exercised by a colleague of the Seprona whom Moreno had accused of giving a "tip-off" to poachers in Alegranza, have not been proven.
Initially, the Prosecutor's Office was asking for four years in prison for Gloria Moreno for including "mendacious" data in the complaint she filed against this colleague, although in the trial she raised an alternative qualification, in case the Court understood that the sergeant did not commit the crime with intent, that is, with intention. For that case, she asked for a fine and a year of disqualification for gross negligence, although this option has also been rejected in the sentence. For his part, the complainant was asking for eight years in prison, accusing her not only of documentary falsehood but also of slander.
"The conclusion could not be more categorical and significant, since the proven facts do not fit into the ideological documentary falsehood in which both the public and private accusations intend to incorporate them, neither in its intentional nor in its imprudent form, and even less so in the crime of slander," the ruling concludes, against which an appeal can now be filed with the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands.
His report may have been "disputed" and "not accurate", but not false
Regarding the report that Moreno sent to his superiors against this agent, the Court points out that it has not been proven that he "deliberately" mutated the truth. "At most, the only thing that can be appreciated is that the content of that report can be discussed or questioned, as has actually happened, and that it may contain some embellishment or detail that could have been avoided, but which in all respects is irrelevant to justify a transmutation of the true into false, at least as far as its essential content is concerned," the judgment adds.
Thus, although it recalls that both the internal investigation and the criminal proceedings that were opened as a result of the sergeant's writing against this agent were eventually filed, it insists that this report "may not be accurate, but it cannot be described as untrue either", since "there is no probative basis indicative of that necessary discrepancy that must exist between reality and what is described or narrated".
"It is simply the result of a professional task that may well be disputed, but which in no way can serve as a basis for proving the mutatio veritatis [transformation of the truth], objective essence of the crime of falsehood," the Court concludes.
