The Provincial Court of Las Palmas has confirmed a sentence of the Criminal Court Number 3 of Arrecife by which a man is sentenced to two years and three months in prison for two robberies with force in homes in Haría, between the months of January and February 2007. The condemned appealed the ruling, of November 23, 2010, but the Court has not given him the reason and, in addition, forces him to pay the costs of the process.
Along with him, a woman who participated in the robberies was also convicted, although she was only sentenced to eight months in prison, since she suffers from schizophrenia and, in addition, she denounced her partner to the Civil Guard.
The events occurred in 2007, when the accused, "guided by an illicit profit motive, entered a house in Haría, "accessing its interior after fracturing the padlock of the gate, fracturing both the entrance door and the one of the room destined for the cellar". According to the judgment of first instance now confirmed by the Provincial Court, he stole several objects from inside such as a washbasin cabinet with a ceramic jug and basin, a rectangular mirror with a wooden frame, a machete, a cork for transporting ferrets, a shepherd's spear, a mortar for grinding cereals, a compressor, a telescope and its tripod.
For the commission of these acts, he had the help of the other accused, who "entered the house helping the accused to load the effects previously stolen in a vehicle". The woman suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, according to the ruling.
Also, in the month of February 2007, the accused entered another house in Haría, "fracturing the access door to a storage room and the window of the main room, causing damages assessed by experts at 1,604.40 euros". Specifically, they stole a gas lamp, twelve CD's, a sculpture, a coat rack with a mirror, a plastic bucket, an extension cord, a flashlight, a radial saw, a tile cutter, a toolbox, a CD player and even a box of Ferrero Rocher chocolates, six bottles of wine and one of cognac.
The accused reported the events to the Civil Guard
Some of the objects were recovered and delivered to their rightful owner, since the accused had kept the stolen objects in a house owned by her grandmother and voluntarily handed them over to the Civil Guard.
Precisely, it was the accused who reported on November 26, 2007 the condemned for having threatened, coerced and forced her to have sexual relations against her will, although he was married and lived with his wife, according to the ruling. When making this complaint, she also informed the Civil Guard that "on several occasions" the accused "had taken her in a vehicle to the northern area of the island of Lanzarote, where he had committed several robberies".
This appearance before the Civil Guard occurred "not at the request or requirement of the agents in the exercise of their investigative activity, but at the initiative" of the woman herself, "without the determining facts in her complaint being directly related to the aforementioned subtractions, to which she made mention in greater abundance of the reported facts, in such a way that the information provided regarding the subtractions that occurred months before can only be considered as spontaneously offered", according to the ruling.
In the judgment, the claim made by the condemned for his drug addiction to be appreciated as an extenuating circumstance is also dismissed, since it was not possible to carry out a test that would prove that he had committed the crimes under the effects of some narcotic substance. The ruling insists that the Center for Attention to Drug Addicts, attached to the Cabildo of Lanzarote, issued a report that accredited that he suffered from a polytoxicomania prior to the commission of the crime, but it was not recorded that in recent dates he had an addiction to toxic drugs, narcotics or psychotropic substances.
Against this sentence, no appeal can be filed.
