The Civil Guard agent who was tried last week for reckless homicide, two counts of injury and one against road safety, has been sentenced to three years in prison. That is the penalty imposed in the sentence already issued by the Criminal Court Number 3 of Arrecife, which considers all the crimes for which she was tried to be proven.
In addition to three years in prison, she is also sentenced to deprivation of the right to drive motor vehicles and mopeds for a period of four years and six months and the loss of validity of the permit. The Prosecutor's Office and the private prosecution, which represented the parents of the deceased and was exercised by the lawyer Daniel Reyes Santana, requested four years in prison for the driver.
In her ruling, Judge Aitziber Oleaga considers it proven that the accused, Bárbara Santana, was on the day of the accident "highly influenced in driving by the consumption of alcoholic beverages and cannabis", as indicated by the results of the blood tests.
The accident occurred in April 2011, when the accused was traveling with three other people in her car, after a party. As a result of the accident, one of her companions, who was also a Civil Guard agent, died, and the other two were seriously injured.
Psychophysical conditions "very diminished"
The sentence proves that Bárbara Santana was driving on the LZ-2 road at around 9:30 p.m. on April 9, 2011 with "her psychophysical conditions very diminished due to the alcohol she had previously ingested." After overtaking on the left a vehicle driven by a National Police officer who was not on duty at more than 80 kilometers per hour, she initiated "an irregular maneuver of abrupt and sudden change of direction to the right from the lane of the highway, instead of doing it from the deceleration lane", at the height of El Cable.
The vehicle "crossed the double continuous longitudinal line" with the intention of accessing the El Cable urbanization, "crossing the right lane of incorporation, the zebra area and the exit lane of the urbanization" at a speed "higher than allowed" of at least 62 kilometers per hour, when the limit is established at 40 kilometers per hour. Subsequently, the car left the road "severing one meter of wall that delimits the garden area, to collide head-on against the trunk of a palm tree".
The driver was transferred to the Doctor José Molina Orosa Hospital where a blood and urine test was performed for "therapeutic purposes". The tests yielded a positive result for alcohol of 1.65 grams of alcohol per liter of blood, as well as positive for cannabis. Although the defense tried to invalidate this test, the judge considers that it was carried out "for therapeutic purposes", within the framework of "a battery of tests, which were essential to determine the subsequent curative treatment to be applied".
The test that "finally incriminates her"
In addition, the magistrate is "struck by the fact" that the Civil Guard agent expressed that she had opposed this blood extraction that "finally incriminates her". "If she had nothing to hide, the normal thing and as she should be used to because of her work, is that she would have facilitated the investigation by having had an accident with such serious injuries and with a deceased person", the judge points out in the sentence.
The judge considers that the Civil Guard agent suffered the accident "as a consequence of the high and undoubted influence of alcohol consumption" and, in addition, carried out a maneuver "completely irregular no matter how you look at it" to access the El Cable urbanization. "Driving in such a confident manner, ignoring the most elementary safety rules, is typical of a person who is influenced by the consumption of alcoholic beverages", the judicial ruling states.
In addition, the sentence also emphasizes the absence of tire tracks on the road "indicative of some type of evasive maneuver". This leads to the thought that the accused "had diminished her capacities, which prevented her from reacting adequately and avoiding the accident". The judge recalls in the ruling that "the consumption of two beers", which is what the accused admitted in court, is "incompatible in every way with such a high alcohol level".
"Infringing the most elementary rules of care"
The magistrate also insists that the death due to gross negligence of a Civil Guard colleague of the accused cannot "be diminished as a consequence of an alleged negligent conduct of the deceased, by not wearing the seat belt as the defense claims". In this sense, she indicates that it has not been proven that the deceased was not wearing the belt, since neither he nor the other occupants were thrown from the vehicle as is usually "usual" when this safety device is not worn.
Therefore, she considers that the accused, "infringing the most elementary rules of care, drove her vehicle after having ingested alcohol in large quantities and, therefore, with her diminished psychophysical faculties, with which without being able to avoid the risk situation created by her, she collided with a palm tree, resulting in damage to her vehicle and two occupants injured with injuries of different consideration and the third one deceased".
Finally, the judge recalls in her ruling that the accused, due to her profession as a Civil Guard, "should have taken extreme precautions not to drive under any circumstances in such conditions". "They are supposed to have greater diligence and a greater respect for the rules than the rest of the citizens, since precisely the agents of the authority are dedicated to pursuing this class of criminal conduct", insists the magistrate, who sentences this agent to three years in prison.