The Court of Instruction number 4 of Arrecife definitively condemned last March in a fast trial J.M.C, an Australian tourist who sexually assaulted a young woman and a minor during the celebration of the Carnival of Costa Teguise. The man, 59 years old, reached an agreement with the prosecution and the Public Prosecutor in which he admitted to having committed these crimes.
For them, the convicted man, who is already back in Australia, assumed the prison sentence of one year and four months, as well as the prohibition of approaching less than 500 meters from the victims, their workplace and any other place frequented by them.
The events date back to March 3 when the accused was at the fair in the municipality of Teguise during the Carnival celebration. The judicial ruling states that the confessed author went to a minor of 13 years and touched her buttocks without her consent. The same situation was repeated later with another young woman of 23 years, to whom he also touched without her consent.
The defense of the confessed author, led by the lawyer Pedro Sobrino, assured last week to La Voz that his client did not have an English interpreter during the celebration of the hearing of conformity and denounced "irregularities" in the case, alleging the defenselessness of his client. For this reason, he filed an appeal for protection with the Constitutional Court and prepared another to go to the Supreme Court. In addition, the basis of the appeal is to denounce that his client was not offered a translated copy in his language of the judicial ruling.
"My client never understood the consequences of a conformity, which does not go through anything other than pleading guilty. He never understood that he had pleaded guilty," his lawyer stressed.
In addition, in the appeal presented to the Constitutional Court, he assured that the convicted man did not discover the imputed crimes until he was able to translate the documentation that was delivered to him after the ruling.
However, the judicial decision to which this editorial office has accessed states that the accused did have an "English interpreter" and states that he stated that he knew what these facts were and that "he acknowledged the facts that are imputed to him."
