The Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court has upheld the ruling of the First Section of the Provincial Court of Las Palmas that sentenced five members of a criminal organization to 29 years in prison for kidnapping and murdering Juan Carlos Tejera in Montaña Mina in March 2015.
Meanwhile, the Chamber has upheld the appeal filed by a T.R.R., who had been convicted as an accomplice to 12 years in prison, and has acquitted her for lack of evidence.
The facts proven in the judgment state that the defendants Nestor David Padilla, Ángelo Delgado and José Carlos Correa traveled from Tenerife to Lanzarote. While the defendants Juan Antonio Delgado, Antonio Enrique and the now acquitted T.R.R. resided on the island when the murdered Juan Carlos Tejera disappeared on the night of March 12 of that year.
That day, according to the court ruling, Juan Carlos Tejera was suddenly approached in the garage of his house in Arrecife, beaten and kidnapped in a pick up type vehicle to the Montaña Mina landfill. His corpse appeared on March 21 of that same year in a cave in the area, tied hand and foot with shackles that prevented him from defending himself.
The judgment states as proven that the defendants agreed to steal the money that Juan Carlos Tejera could have hidden, since he had been convicted of a drug trafficking crime years before. To do this, they introduced a GPS device in his vehicle and followed him before the night of March 12.
As a result of the beating they gave him, the victim suffered several injuries. Among them, severe traumatic brain injury, contusions, fractures in the toes, or in the white parts of the neck that led him to end his life.
The Provincial Court sentenced each of them to 24 years in prison and absolute disqualification for the crime of illegal detention in medial competition with that of murder and five years in prison and disqualification for the right of passive suffrage during the time of the sentence for the crime of belonging to a criminal organization.
In addition, the offenders must compensate the victim's partner with 100,000 euros, the siblings with 18,000 euros each and the parents with 48,000 euros each.
Appeal of T.R.R.
The Supreme Court acquits T.R.R. considering as "insufficient" the evidentiary material for which she was sentenced to 12 years in prison for the crimes of accomplice to murder and illegal detention.
The Chamber understands that the evidence on which her guilt was built is "extremely fragile" and that it is compatible with "other non-incriminating alternative hypotheses." Specifically, her extramarital relationship with one of the convicts, her work as an intermediary between an information expert and one of them to explain how the GPS worked to supposedly follow the victim and some WhatsApp messages are the evidence that existed against her.