2024-02-13 03:01:00
The Buenos Aires Supreme Court of Justice revoked the seven-year prison sentence imposed on a nurse who in 2014, in the city of Azul, attacked her husband with an ax, who died months later, and ordered that a new sentence be handed down. but with a gender perspective: the judges maintained that it must be taken into account that the woman was a victim of violence by her partner for almost 40 years.
The ruling of the province’s highest court was issued at the request of an appeal for “arbitrariness” presented by the defense of the convicted nurse, María Cristina Santillán (65), before the Buenos Aires Court of Cassation, which, upon being rejected, reached in complaint to the highest provincial court of justice.
In that appeal, the defense questioned the amount of the seven-year prison sentence that the nurse received on September 1, 2017 from the judge of the Criminal Court 2 of Azul, Alejandra Raverta, after a popular jury found her guilty of the crime of “very serious injuries” and acquitted her of “homicide aggravated by the relationship” to the detriment of her husband, Ricardo Hernández (61), who died eight months after the attack.
The basis of the defense was that, at the time of deciding to apply seven years in prison, the judge ignored a psychiatric expert report carried out on Santillán and which exposed the effects generated by the “permanent and prolonged” violence that the accused suffered from her partner. .
The defense highlighted that “the State remained absent” during the entire period in which the accused suffered violence and considered that the attack she committed against her husband was a consequence of the “historical violence” that she suffered. In addition – based on the aforementioned expert opinion – he asserted that Santillán suffered from a long-standing “post-traumatic stress disorder” due to “38 years of suffering from psychological, economic, sexual and extreme physical violence, which had a negative impact on in their psychic apparatus and in their self-esteem”.
For this reason, he considered that the ruling by which Santillán was sentenced to seven years in prison “ignores” the reduction of the sentence when assessing the context in which it was developed and denounced the “lack of gender perspective” in the trial of the case.
Although this entire proposal was rejected by Chamber III of the Buenos Aires Court of Cassation, when the case reached the Buenos Aires Court, its ministers understood that the appeal should succeed.
For the judges, the Cassation decision “leaves aside the evidentiary analysis of the case with a gender perspective at the core of determining the sentence.” “No consideration was made regarding the expert report of Dr. Enrique Stola. There it is specified that the post-traumatic stress disorder was a consequence of the history of discrimination and violence suffered by the accused at the hands of her husband: it was proven that she suffered for almost thirty-eight years of disqualifications, threats and violent physical acts, psychological, economic, sexual and extreme physical violence by the person who was ultimately attacked,” says the ruling of the highest provincial court.
And he adds: “This being the case, there was no analysis of the context in its real dimension, in such a way as to allow us to appreciate why these particular circumstances make the reproach of guilt less intense. The gender category requires contextualized examinations to be carried out. And in In this sense, regarding the punitive measurement, the approach failed to adopt the appropriate perspective to act with due diligence.
For this reason, with the signature of the ministers Hilda Kogan, Luis Genoud, Sergio Torres and Daniel Soria, the Court decided to “refer the case to Cassation again so that it can issue a new decision in accordance with the law” regarding the amount of the penalty. to apply to the nurse.
According to what was proven in the trial to which she was subjected in 2017, on September 16, 2014, at approximately 3:30, Santillán attacked her husband with three blows in the right temporal parietal area using an ax that they had in their possession. the house and when the man was in a room on the first floor of the house at San Martín 1339, in Azul. The man was hospitalized as a result of his injuries, but two months later he was discharged and went to live in a nursing home, where he died six months later from an infection.
In the popular trial to which she was subjected, Santillán was convicted of “very serious injuries,” one of the options put forward by her defense, and not of “homicide aggravated by the bond” as the prosecution had required. During the debate, nearly 30 witnesses testified, including experts, police officers and relatives of the couple, some of whom reported that the woman was routinely beaten and denigrated by her husband.
In her last words before the verdict, Santillán recalled the “beatings” that Hernández gave her when she was pregnant with her daughter and said, while her lawyer and much of the public cried, that “she would have preferred to be one less.” At the sentencing hearing, the prosecution had requested a sentence of eight years and the defense three, after which the judge handed down a sentence of seven.