2023-05-30 14:01:10
A judicial sentence is not always easy to understand, but it can deeply affect a person, to the point of implying whether or not they go to jail or if the administration assumes their guardianship. And people with some kind of intellectual disability sometimes find themselves with the problem of understanding a document that marks their life but that is written in a technical language that is impossible to decipher. The Supreme Court, following the indications of the regulations that came into force last year, has just issued two resolutions in which it is committed to adapting the text of the resolutions to make it easier to understand if one of those affected is a person with intellectual disability.
Criminal judges have studied two cases with people with intellectual disabilities both in the defendants’ dock and in the victims’ section. One of them confirms the acquittal of a man accused of raping a woman with “slight mental retardation” in Zaragoza in 2007. The other sentence confirms the probation measure imposed in Cantabria on a man for abusing a young man with a disability 66%.
In this second case, the abuser was exempted from a prison sentence because “he has suffered from deaf-mutism since birth without any training, he was not educated or acquired reading and writing skills or learned sign language, which has prevented him from developing an intellectual and cognitively adequately by altering their awareness of reality”.
The judges dismissed all the appeals filed by the parties against both sentences but included a paragraph so that their content is adapted to the people directly affected and, therefore, more interested in knowing their content. “This sentence must be brought to the personal knowledge of the complainant. For this, it is appropriate, given her intellectual disability, to order that this sentence also be written in an easy-to-read format, ”says the Supreme Court.
People with intellectual disabilities can be involved in criminal proceedings as defendants, victims or witnesses, but also in other jurisdictions where other courts have already recommended and put them into practice, especially in civil matters. It is in civil courts where judges decide, for example, on the guardianship of a person with intellectual disabilities, or in family proceedings. In Asturias, for example, the Superior Court of Justice launched in 2019 a system for adapting sentences.
It is the first time that one of these decisions comes from the criminal chamber of the Supreme Court. The judges appeal, first of all, to the United Nations Convention from 2006 but also to the Spanish regulations of 2022 which in its article 19.2 is specific on this matter: “Public administrations will promote information and accessibility to justice for especially vulnerable groups according to the causes established in this law.”
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