The Supreme Court (TS) has rejected the appeal filed by four captains of a dugout canoe, which arrived in the south of Tenerife in 2023 with 59 passengers, five of whom were minors, eleven injured, and one deceased, and each of them has been sentenced to 5.5 years, of which 3 are for facilitating immigration and 2.5 for homicide and serious injuryRegarding civil liability, it is also ratified that they will have to jointly pay compensation totaling almost 99,500 euros with amounts ranging from 90,000 euros to the deceased's father and between 6,000 and 270 euros to the injured.The defendants were at the helm of a pirogue that departed from Senegal on June 27 and arrived at the port of Los Cristianos on July 2, 2023, and despite the four declaring themselves innocent, subsequent rulings consider them responsible for having divided the tasks of steering the vesselThe Supreme Court considers valid the testimony of seven passengers out of the 16 interviewed, who recognized the defendants as captains upon arrival at the port, then at the Court, and it was reproduced in the trial that took place at the Provincial Court of TenerifeThe four defendants questioned the witnesses' statement considering that they were offered to benefit from the immigration law, avoiding expulsion, and they see essential discrepancies in their testimonies.
As proof of their innocence they propose that there was an engine failure and the majority of the passengers decided to continue the trip, which would go on to demonstrate that the decisions were made by everyone or that one of the accused only distributed food
The Supreme Court recalls the limitations for modifying rulings from other instances and in this case deems the witnesses' statements, taken as pre-constituted evidence, "relevant" as they identified the defendants by photographs
The same happens with the testimony of the agents, the report from Maritime Rescue, from forensic experts, from Toxicology, the ocular inspection and reports of assistance and hospital treatment of the injured and the tasks performed by the skippers are related
In conclusion, the Supreme Court concludes that there is sufficient substantiated evidence based on the statements of the injured parties and expert, testimonial, and documentary evidence that has been considered "credible, objectively plausible, and convincing, and in whose assessment no signs of arbitrariness are appreciated".The experts confirm that the cause of death was multi-organ failure and dehydration and that the other injured presented infections, respiratory failure, burns and ulcers, among others, which in some cases were "very serious" and required up to 51 days for their healingThe Prosecutor's Office was proposing a sentence of fifteen and a half years in prison for each of them, 6 for facilitating illegal immigration, 4 for reckless homicide, and six months for each of the eleven injured, while the defense requested acquittal due to lack of evidence.