2024-03-02 22:11:21
The judges in the case of the 21-year-old girl who suffered a rape in a car in Plaza Serrano two years ago They determined that it could not be proven that there had been a previously agreed plan between the accused to abuse the girl.and therefore, sentences were reduced and acquittals were granted.
According to the foundations of the sentence from the oral debate that took place on December 22, the Oral Criminal Court (TOC) 14 finally downplayed this key aggravating factor in the criminal classification with which they reached the trial, which ended with only two of the six original defendants receiving an effective prison sentence.
Convictions and acquittals
On the one hand, Ángel Pascual Ramos (25) and Lautaro Dante Ciongo Pasotti (26) are the only ones who ended up with a six-year prison sentence for “sexual abuse with carnal access” and today they remain in prison for the case.
The sentence is based mainly on the videos from the security cameras that on February 28, 2022 captured them abusing the young woman inside Ciongo Pasotti’s car. In addition, DNA tests detected their genetic profiles in swabs and in the victim’s underwear. And to this is added the story of the bakers who reported the incident and the investigative statement of one of the acquitted.
On the other hand, Thomás Fabián Domínguez (23) and Steven Alexis Cuzzoni (21) were sentenced to one year in prison “suspended” for “simple sexual abuse”, so on the day of the ruling, they regained their freedom. The videos proved that both kissed and groped the victim when they were in a kiosk, in Serrano 1500, but they were not attributed any participation or responsibility.
Those acquitted in the young woman’s case were Ignacio Retondo (24), who for the court only played the guitar on the sidewalk, and Franco Jesús Lykan (25), who was able to prove that he was very drunk that morning. and he only got into the back seat of the car to fall asleep. However, Lykan was sentenced to a six-month suspended prison sentence but for the crime of “minor injuries” caused to neighbor Luis Riveros Espínola, when he hit him believing that he was filming with his cell phone what his friends were doing in the car. friends.
The basis of the sentence
Judges Gabriel Eduardo Vega, Gustavo Pablo Valle and Domingo Luis Altieri considered that, throughout the debate, the original hypothesis of the accusation raised in the request for submission to trial by the investigating prosecutor Eduardo Rosende could never be proven.
This one held that since the capture of the young woman in the after “Espacio Ro Techno Bar” to Plaza Serrano, there had existed between the six accused “a prior plan, with an agreement of wills and roles” and that earned them, from the investigation, an accusation as “co-authors” of “sexual abuse with carnal access aggravated by the intervention of two or more people”, crime with a penalty of up to 20 years in prison and which kept them in preventive detention for almost two years.
Likewise, the idea reformulated by trial prosecutor Fernando Klappenbach that the plan began at the Curiosity kiosk, where Domínguez and Cuzzoni had a first sexual approach with the young woman to “soften her,” was rejected.
“I consider that having evaluated the evidence according to the rigorous scrutiny imposed by the principle of innocence, it is not possible to rely on the hypothesis of the public accuser. The fact is that the evidentiary material provided data that casts doubt on the creation of a plan such as the one described,” he stated. the president of TOC 14, Judge Vega, who led with his vote the foundations to which his other two colleagues adhered.
“There was no such plan”
For Vega, The fact that these cameras have not been taken care of is another indication of the lack of a plan. “If the criminal plan involved taking the victim to a place where they could violate her with protection, of all the places in the world, the least suitable was Ciongo Pasotti’s vehicle, located in a nerve center of the city, where They brought together every long carnival holiday walker and tourist there was in the universe. The furtive criminals in that rigorously planned plan did not even take the trouble to take care of the detail of verifying that there were no cameras watching them, something quite predictable in the scenario. chosen,” he said.
He also stressed that “the cell phones of all the accused were seized and examined and no trace was found to indicate that there was in the meantime any kind of communication between them in the style of: ‘guys, I’ll wait for you in the car’, ‘let’s go there ‘, ‘At 1:30 p.m. we meet at Curiosity and we go to the car.'” “There was no conversation of this style, and of course I rule out telepathic ones,” Vega said in a sentence expressed with very little pertinent irony.
When analyzing the content of the videos, the judge maintains that “the prior planning of taking the victim to the car to sexually assault her is incompatible with the spontaneous gestures of surprise that can be seen in the defendants who are left outside the vehicle.”
“Not only was there no such plan, neither prior nor concocted at the time, but there was also no active surveillance. They were spectators of an unpleasant act that good taste advised to repudiate instead of celebrating.“, he noted. In this sense, Vega concluded that “everything that happened was not, then, a joint work, but the fruit of individual bets that came together casually and causally in the same time and space.”