Felipe Fernández Camero tried to prevent the Investigating Court Number 2 of Arrecife from investigating who visited José Francisco Reyes in prison. The objective of this measure was to determine if someone could have influenced the former mayor of Yaiza to withdraw his confession about receiving bribes, and Fernández Camero's defense presented an appeal against the diligence ordered by the judge.
However, this appeal did not stop the investigation, and the data sent by the Tahíche Penitentiary Center, as La Voz de Lanzarote reported last week, confirmed the visit of a person who is not Reyes' lawyer in this process. Precisely, Felipe Fernández Camero's daughter and lawyer in this case, Juana Fernández de las Heras. A few days after meeting with her in prison, Reyes asked to testify again before the judge to withdraw his initial confession.
Furthermore, Fernández Camero was not the only one who tried to prevent this data from being obtained. José Francisco Reyes' own lawyer, Pablo Luna, also joined this appeal later, "endorsing each and every one of the arguments put forward in it, considering that such a request is in accordance with the law and fully expresses the opinion of this party", as stated in the document he presented in Court. And all this, he argued in response to the Public Prosecutor's Office's writing that gave rise to this diligence and that, among other things, raised the suspicion that many of those accused in this case could be acting in a coordinated manner to hinder the investigation.
An "impertinent" diligence
In their respective appeals, both Reyes' defense and Fernández Camero's defense maintain that the diligence is "totally impertinent" because "it has no relation to the object of the process", and they affirm that knowing who visited the former mayor of Yaiza in prison implies "a clear intrusion" and "a serious violation of the fundamental right to defense", despite the fact that Juana Fernández de las Heras is not José Francisco Reyes' lawyer in this case.
In fact, what the Public Prosecutor's Office intended, and the judge when attending to their request, was not to know the visits of their legal representatives in this process, but to determine if he had met with lawyers of other defendants, as is the case of Felipe Fernández Camero's daughter, whom the Prosecutor's Office points out as "the instigator of José Francisco Reyes' allegedly criminal conduct". But despite the fact that the existence of that visit was confirmed, Reyes' lawyer maintains that the request responded to "a series of conjectures and suppositions" by the prosecutor.
"Conspiracy of the defenses"
Regarding the suspicion that there may be a "joint defense of the defendants", Reyes' lawyer denies it but maintains that, even if it were so, the "possible conspiracies of the defenses" would not justify this measure either, "since there is nothing extraordinary in several defenders collaborating to coordinate their strategy".
Furthermore, despite the fact that in his initial confession Reyes pointed out several businessmen who have become defendants in the case, implicating them in the alleged payment of bribes in exchange for the granting of illegal licenses, the former mayor's lawyer maintains in his writing that "the statement made by Reyes retracting his initial statement, only affects himself (or in any case his family)". In that same writing, his lawyer affirms that Reyes withdrew his confession "almost immediately", although it took him more than a month to do so.
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[Fernández Camero's daughter visited José Francisco Reyes in prison a few days before he retracted his statement->44614]
[The Court investigates who visited Reyes in prison to find out if they pressured him to withdraw his confession->44159]
