The State Attorney General's Office has issued a circular in which it insists that the sentences of those convicted of sexual crimes should not be reviewed, if they are included in the bracket established by the law of 'only yes is yes' for each crime.
With this, the State Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz, intends to expand and reinforce the action criteria contained in the decree that he sent to all prosecutors in November, which reduces the cases in which prosecutors will support a reduction in the sentence initially imposed on sexual offenders.
In fact, García Ortiz has convened a meeting of Chamber Prosecutors for next Thursday in which this circular will be addressed, which this morning has been sent to all Chamber prosecutors for their analysis prior to the conclave on the 16th.
The circular, to which EFE has had access, makes it clear that "as a general rule, final convictions will not be reviewed when the penalty imposed in the sentence is also likely to be imposed under the new legal framework."
However, it stresses that "each procedure must be analyzed individually, avoiding automatisms that prevent an assessment of the specific circumstances in each case."
Regarding the cases of review of final judgments, the circular establishes that action will be taken "exceptionally" only "when the strict application of this rule causes manifestly disproportionate results."
"This possibility should be reserved for cases in which it is notorious that if the facts had been prosecuted under the new regulation, the prison sentence that would have been imposed would undoubtedly be of a much shorter duration," he adds.
In these cases, "prosecutors will be especially cautious" when examining the equivalence between the repealed criminal offense and the current one, having to take into account aggravating and mitigating circumstances.
And the prosecutors will also promote the review of sentences when the sentence "is within the limits of typicality" given the "low offensiveness of the conduct."
The review, in such a case, must "necessarily" start from the principle of retroactivity of the most favorable criminal law, in such a way that "those criminal laws that favor the accused will have retroactive effect, even if when they came into force a final sentence had passed and the subject I was serving a sentence."
