The harsh setback suffered by Jesús María Barrientos, president of the TSJC, after the Supreme Court forced him to repeat the trial by the Parliamentary Table of Carme Forcadell for lack of impartiality compromises his presence in future trials of the process. It is not guaranteed that Barrientos can preside over the hearing against the architects of the State structures, Jové and Salvadó, which will be the next to be held at the TSJC and for which there is still no date. Judges from the TSJC environment consulted by La Vanguardia assure that they take note of what was resolved by the Supreme Court but limit the matter to a "merely technical" issue and far from any operation that questions the credibility of the president of the TSJC who has his support . "Those are the rules of the game. This is how we advance in law, that is not a reproach ”, underlines a senior official of the magistracy.
The Supreme Court ordered the hearing to be repeated after warning that two of the three judges – Barrientos and Carlos Ramos – had attended the trial contaminated. They had issued an order during the investigation in which they ruled on key elements of the case. The doctrine of the European Court of Human Rights and the Constitutional Court has raised the level of demand on the impartiality that judges must ensure. In addition, the Organic Law of the Judiciary states that the judge who participates in any proceeding of the investigation cannot later prosecute those facts.
"It was a miscalculation," says another judicial source, adding that Barrientos and Ramos "misjudged the scope of the doctrine on the appearance of impartiality and should have abstained." Never before has the president of the TSJC been reprimanded for this issue and the independence movement has taken advantage of it to place Barrientos in the firing line and attack the politicization of justice. For the independentistas it is a new victory. They have previously managed to remove Barrientos from the trial against Roger Torrent's Parliamentary Board, at the request of the former vice president of the Chamber, Josep Costa. The special Chamber set up to discuss these issues accepted the defendant's arguments and endorsed that the presence of the president of the TSJC in that trial could "cast doubt on his impartiality."
As a backdrop, it is possible to move to February 2018. The then president of Parliament, Roger Torrent, was giving a lecture at the Barcelona Bar Association festivity and when he spoke the words political prisoners: Barrientos, the superior prosecutor and other representatives of the judiciary rose in protest and left the room. That gesture of disapproval, applauded by constitutionalism, has been turned against the president of the TSJC who has seen how the recusal could cost him in the rest of the cases related to the process that are judged in the TSJC. The judges, on the other hand, do not believe that he will be removed from the case against Laura Borràs, whom they see as "totally unrelated" to 1-O, although her defense has requested it. Barrientos took office in 2016 and has had to face all the tensions of the process.
He sentenced Artur Mas for 9-N, disqualified Quim Torra and also the Forcadell Bureau. In 2019, he applied for a position in the Supreme Court and presented the 9-N sentence as a merit, but he did not get it. In these years, Barrientos has shown himself to be as polite as he is relentless in the face of any threat. After 1-O he withdrew the Mossos from custody of the Palace of Justice and then kept them for a year watching courts after several attacks with CDR excrement.
