The General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) will investigate the actions of the First Investigating Court of Arrecife (Lanzarote) in the case against Raúl Díaz Cachón, the man accused of killing and dismembering his wife, Romina Celeste Núñez, on January 1, 2019 on that Canary Island.
The suspect was released on January 13 after spending four years in pretrial detention, the maximum allowed by law, with no date yet set for his trial.
Sources from the governing body of the judges indicate that the disciplinary authority of the Council has already admitted for processing the complaint presented by the lawyer of the victim's family,
The complaint, which entered through the Citizen Attention Unit, has already reached the promoter of the disciplinary action of the CGPJ, Ricardo Conde, and is being processed.
Conde must now obtain a report from the court before determining if he opens a disciplinary file that could end in a sanction for the head of that body.
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The complaint by the lawyer, Emilia Zeballos, includes a detailed account of the obstacles that the judicial investigation encountered, especially since January 2020, when an expert report was commissioned to determine if scissors purchased by the defendant before the crime whether or not they were suitable for butchering human flesh.
The document was entrusted to the Civil Guard on November 18, 2019, but in January 2020 it was referred to the Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences, under the Ministry of Justice of the Government of the Canary Islands.
On June 24, the court reiterated its request to this body, which then responded arguing that it needed the scissors to be sent to it.
The court sent them on August 27,
but almost a year passed without the Institute of Legal Medicine giving any news while the court did not claim the document either.
On July 9, 2021, the court insisted on his request.
And in March 2022, he communicated an ultimatum to the autonomous body and demanded that it deliver the report in 10 days.
The expert evidence finally arrived on April 8, 2022. During those two years, the case was practically paralyzed, according to the lawyer, despite the fact that the technical report was "merely circumstantial."
The letter that has led to the opening of the investigation by the CGPJ states: “It is intolerable that the Court has entered into the game of practicing the evidence of the scissors, whose purpose was to delay;
It is also intolerable that the public prosecutor's office, which must ensure the legality of the procedure, has consented that for more than a year it has been limited, practically, to the diligence of the scissors, whose purpose was irrelevant”.
The lawyer also criticizes the delay in a psychological report on the defendant requested by his defense, another of the procedures that are "irrelevant", according to the lawyer, because it is not a psychiatric report "that could affect guilt or the circumstances at the time to impose the sentence”.
The Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) already carried out a first internal investigation after knowing the release of Díaz Cachón and determined that no dysfunction had occurred because the case was never paralyzed.
Three different judges have passed through the Investigating Court 1 of Arrecife in four years, but according to the TSJC investigation there is "no indication" that any of them "could have incurred some type of responsibility."
The report does admit that "some anomaly in the excessive duration of the preparation of some expert reports, despite their extreme complexity and that, in cases such as the present case with a prisoner, should be avoided", but it points out that the only person responsible is the Institute of legal medicine.
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