05/04/2021 11:01
Clarín.com
Society
Updated 05/04/2021 11:13
In a shortened trial, a man was sentenced to six years and ten months in prison for
beating a friend and letting him burn to death
in the El Cerrito passage, in Tandil, a city in the province of Buenos Aires.
The incident occurred in 2017. On June 14 of that year, around 7:50 p.m., a group of seven jugglers and window cleaners from the city were gathered around a bonfire on a public walkway.
At one point, five of them decided to leave the place and go to a traffic light, 150 meters away, to carry out their activity.
José María Jara and Juan José Acuña (alias “el maro”) stayed, alone, near the fire.
And between the two began an argument
.
According to details of the case, after the verbal dispute, Jara physically attacked Acuña, hit him on the head and caused a blunt injury to the scalp, in the right parietal region.
As a result of the blow, Acuña lost his balance and
fell into the flames,
unable to recover or move away from them by his own means.
“In its reckless version, the conduct of physically attacking Acuña on the head in the vicinity of a lit campfire contained in itself a risk of producing, among the possible results, the indicated injury and the fall of the victim on the fire that effectively it happened;
these foreseeable consequences
for Jara ”, sentenced the judge in the case, Guillermo Arecha, as reproduced by the newspaper
El Eco
, from Tandil.
The magistrate argued that "despite this, he could not carry out the violent action described or, if he did, take the necessary precautions so that said outcome did not occur, for example, modify the direction and control the force of the blow inflicted or move away to the victim of the fire at the time of attacking him ".
Also, said the magistrate, by not doing anything to prevent his friend from falling into the flames, Jara
violated the duty of care
that the circumstances of the moment demanded of him.
For both the judge and the prosecution, Jara was obliged to help Acuña.
But the aggressor
did nothing more than leave the place
and go to where his other companions were, to whom he told them that he had beaten and thrown Acuña into the fire.
That confession was key at the time of the conviction.
In this regard, Judge Arecha emphasized that although these statements do not amount to a confession made with all the guarantees within the criminal process, there was no obstacle in terms of assessing them as a more indicative element within a more global evidentiary framework.
Jara's sayings coincide with the testimony of three of the witnesses who, in turn, reported that a few minutes after the aggressor went to the traffic light and carried out said demonstration, Goñi, another member of the group who had fallen asleep meters away from the campfire, he appeared running, completely nervous and asking
It helps because
Acuña was on fire
.
At that moment, everyone ran to help the victim, except for Jara, who took another path and disappeared from the scene.
For the judge, in any case, the defendant
had no intention of killing
his friend, which is why he is given only the figure of abandonment of person, foreseen and punished by article 106 of the Penal Code.
According to the judge, the fact that Jara told his friends what he had just done allows us to think about the possibility that he did not intend to
hide his actions
or to prevent outside third parties from preventing the fatal outcome.
Indeed, although at the time of giving notice the fact was already in progress, the death result had not yet been given.
For that reason, says the newspaper
El Eco
, the magistrate estimated that the outcome of the event could have been changed from the active intervention of the group to which he was giving notice.
Thus, Jara's actions are not compatible with those of someone who has started a voluntary causal course and wants to
make sure of its results
, the judge ordered.
There was also no evidence that Jara had a motive to do what he did.
The witnesses said that the aggressor, when passing through the traffic light and giving notice, only affirmed that his attack on Acuña was due to the fact that he
had broken a bottle of sugarcane
.
In addition, they said that although Acuña, when they were all gathered, incited the fight by saying "you are a cat", none of them paid attention to that, including Jara, because they were all used to that way of acting by Acuña.
Jara was then sentenced to five years in prison for the crime of
"abandonment of a person followed by death"
, but the judge unified that sentence with others that the man had pending and determined one of six years and ten months.
LGP
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