Stratvs case sentence: an incomprehensible delay

January 22 2018 (13:47 WET)

On June 23, 2017, the criminal trial for the alleged commission of crimes of urban planning prevarication and influence peddling in the granting of the activity license of the Stratvs Winery was adjourned for sentencing. Seven months have passed, and the sentence has not yet been made public, so that to the catalog of obscenities and improper conduct and attitudes that those who attended the trial sessions had to digest, are now added the stupor and growing outrage at the incomprehensible and unjustifiable delay in making said sentence public.

Rumors circulate in the forum indicating that the sentence was drafted in September, and that the delay is due to the drafting of a dissenting opinion by one of the members of the court. The dissenting opinion is the mechanism through which magistrates who do not agree with the content of a judicial resolution can express their opinion, and it can be concurrent when there is agreement with the ruling, but not with the legal argumentation on which it is based, and dissenting when the disagreement reaches not only the legal considerations, but also the meaning of the ruling.

Apparently, in this case the dissenting opinion would be dissenting, in which case the reasons for the discrepancy should have surfaced immediately during the development of the deliberation process, so it should be relatively easy to express the opinions on which the disagreement is based, so that the drafting of the dissenting opinion cannot justify the enormous delay that the publication of the sentence is suffering.

In addition, there is the circumstance that the responsibility for this incomprehensible and unjustifiable delay falls on the person in whom governmental functions concur in addition to the strictly jurisdictional ones, that is, who presides over the collegiate body that must issue the sentence and the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands itself, so he should be the first interested in giving the greatest speed to that procedure due to the legal obligations that fall upon him, including those concerning the maintenance of the prestige of the courts of justice and the components of the collegiate body that have complied with the duty to issue the resolution within the legal deadlines.

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