The Constitutional Court is going to dictate a second sentence on the former Podemos deputy Alberto Rodríguez in its plenary session this week, with the purpose of granting him protection again and annulling the decision of the former president of Congress Meritxell Batet to expel him from the chamber after the conviction of one month and fifteen days in prison imposed by the Supreme Court.
This conviction, for kicking a police officer in a demonstration, should not have entailed a prison sentence, in accordance with the first sentence handed down by the Supreme Court in the case of Alberto Rodríguez.
The new resolution, therefore, will avoid containing a direct reproach to Batet, estimating that its decision to deprive the Podemos deputy of his seat had as its sole reason the content of the Supreme Court's ruling, which should have been limited to imposing a fine. , which would have meant that the aforementioned parliamentarian would have been able to remain in Congress.
The fact that there will be a second ruling on the case of Alberto Rodríguez is due to the fact that his departure from Congress gave rise to two very different appeals before the Constitutional Court.
In one of them, the sentence imposed by the Supreme Court for the attack on a police officer, a kick without consequences, was questioned.
And in the other it was questioned whether the consequence of the prison sentence of one month and fifteen days that was included in the aforementioned ruling should mean the loss of his seat.
The first thing the Constitutional Court had to decide was in what order it resolved the appeals, and it chose to analyze the sentencing appeal first, especially since the majority of the magistrates came to the conclusion that the decision of the former president of Congress depriving Rodríguez of his seat should be understood as a direct consequence of a prison sentence – with the consequence of carrying with it the parallel sentence of disqualification – unduly imposed on the former deputy.
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Once these fundamental ideas were put in order, on the 16th the Constitutional Court agreed to grant protection to Rodríguez against the Supreme Court's condemnation.
The court's argument is that, strictly speaking, there are no prison sentences of less than three months, because they must be commuted to a fine.
The guarantee body therefore resolved to partially annul the Supreme Court ruling, estimating that its ruling should have focused on the imposition of a financial penalty, and in the ruling not even mention the prison sentence.
The Constitutional Court's thesis, in short, is that the Supreme Court should not have left said commutation of the sentence until the execution phase of its sentence, but should have done so at the time of issuing its resolution.
With the second ruling of the Constitutional Court - relating to Rodríguez's appeal against his expulsion from Congress by Batet - what the guarantee body is going to resolve is whether this deputy was correctly expelled from the Cortes.
And the majority criterion in the court is that said decision to deprive him of his seat violated the rights of political participation of Alberto Rodríguez, and that of his voters, who were no longer represented by him without there being any cause for said deprivation.
In the majority's decision, the fact that the deputy's resignation occurred after there was an opinion from the legal services of Congress in which it was estimated that there was not sufficient reason to deprive him of his seat, even given the circumstance, has had some weight. that the Supreme Court's ruling included a prison sentence, and was not limited to a fine.
The four judges from the conservative sector, in turn, have already expressed their disagreement with the first sentence, which they will foreseeably maintain in this case.
His thesis was that it is the first time that the Constitutional Court "modifies the penalty that must be imposed on a convicted person, considering that the penalty imposed is a fine and not imprisonment."
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