The Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands has opened a disciplinary proceeding against a lawyer for "serious irregularities" by citing non-existent judgments in appeals filed before the court. At the same time, it accuses the lawyer of relying on a procedural situation "alien to reality" by claiming that documentation that did exist in the proceedings was omitted.
It is an appeal filed against the sentence that sentenced nine people for trafficking cocaine and heroin in Lanzarote and that, as La Voz published this Tuesday, have been sentenced to between three and six years, much lower than initially requested by the Prosecutor's Office.
The Criminal Chamber detected that irregularity, which it considers "intolerable", when reviewing the sentence of the Court of Las Palmas that imposed sentences of up to six years in prison for drug trafficking on nine people who were bringing cocaine into Lanzarote.
To combat that resolution, one of the defense attorneys invoked a 2020 Supreme Court ruling and a 1990 Constitutional Court ruling, which served him to question the documentation that justified the Police's action.
The TSJC remarks that the lawyer presents those jurisprudential citations as central in his appeal, quotes them and highlights them in bold, and based on them a serious procedural consequence: the possible nullity of the proceedings.
However, the magistrates add, there is a problem: the paragraphs with the supposed jurisprudence mentioned by the lawyer do not appear in the cited sentences, nor in others with a related numbering.
The Supreme Court ruling that invokes "not only does not bear any relation to this issue (documentation of police proceedings) but it does not contain that text, nor any similar one," explains the Chamber. And the same happens with the Constitutional Court ruling, which "neither contains this transcribed text, nor one similar, nor does it deal with this issue directly or indirectly."
For the TSJC, it is not a "mere slip or venial error", but rather an "intolerable" conduct on the part of the lawyer that may deserve disciplinary action.
A previous case
It is the second case that has come to light in which a lawyer uses false sentences in the Canary Islands after last February the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) sentenced another lawyer for introducing up to 48 false citations of jurisprudence, generated by Artificial Intelligence, in an appeal brief.
The TSJC fined him 420 euros and forwarded its decision and the background to the affected lawyer's Bar Association, so that "if appropriate, it may determine the disciplinary responsibilities he may have incurred".
