The Supreme Court of Justice, gathered in the Constitutional Chamber, ordered that the apprehension orders against 11 police officers accused of committing a homicide be released.
These agents were released since April 14, 2021 by orders of the Third Chamber of the Court of Appeals of Zulia. On June 10 of that same year 2021 the Public Ministry expressed its rejection of that decision of the Court of Appeals and left it written in an amparo action filed on that date before the Constitutional Chamber.
The response of the magistrates came four years later through Judgment 1302 of the Constitutional Chamber published on August 6. Through this judgment, the Chamber annulled the decision of the Third Chamber of the Court of Appeals of Zulia that released the 11 police. And consequently, he ordered the court to know the aforementioned file, to deliver the corresponding apprehension orders against the 11 police officers.
The facts for which the uniformed men are criminally prosecuted, occurred on Monday, March 8, 2021 when Nancy Terán left her home located in the San Francisco municipality (Zulia) in the company of her son Jhonny Boscan (21) who was driving the Chevrolet Aveo. They arrived at the Maracaibo star bakery located in the La Coromoto sector. Her son was in the vehicle while she was shopping. But the lady forgot the key to the electronic card, so she returned to the car to ask her son. Nancy did not find the vehicle or her son, so she entered despair until she warned her husband what happened.
Given that situation, Nancy asked the clients who were around the bakery, who told her that several men dressed in black and carrying firearms reached the car where her son was, they took him by force, put him in another vehicle and marched. Part of that procedure was recorded by emergency cameras of the 911 service.
Subsequently they informed the boy’s dad that he had died during a police confrontation.
The Public Ministry initiated the inquiries that led to the arrest of the 11 police officers involved in the event, which were charged on March 12, 2021 before the 20th Court of control of the Zulia that decreed them deprived of liberty.
The investigation showed that the detainee was “cruelly treated” as evidenced by the legal necropcia. And the fact of having triggered the victim was a “indisputably malicious” behavior, as appreciated by the representatives of the Public Ministry, who also detected that the police presented the fact as a confrontation.
Because of this, the Public Ministry charged officials simulation of punishable fact, qualified homicide, cruel treatment and improper use of organic weapon.
Once the officials were charged, the following month, that is, April 14, 2021, the Court of Appeals of Zulia granted them a precautionary measure that released them. To do this, the three courts of the Court determined that the officials acted within the framework of a confrontation with the person who was dead.
That is why the Public Ministry, represented in the prosecutors María Ginette Córdova Lum Fatt, Freddy Reyes and Adrianny Ramos, interposed the Amparo action since they consider that “granting restricted freedom or not, to people prosecuted for this type of facts, can lead to impunity, since they would have the possibility of definitively absenting the process.”
When analyzing the matter, the magistrates noticed that the members of the Third Chamber of the Court of Appeals of Zulia acted as if they constituted a trial court, when they entered to assess the evidence collected to establish the guilt or innocence of a accused.
«The (Constitutional) Chamber warns that the Third Chamber of the Court of Appeals of the Criminal Judicial Circuit of the Zulia State, carried out a partial analysis of the police records and evidence at that time and established a legal argument as if it were the contradictory debate, typical of the phase of oral and public trial … without realizing that the process was in the presentation phase of the accused, the opportunity in which the investigation had not concluded On the part of the Public Ministry … ”, say the magistrates who consider that this Court of Appeals “acted outside the limits of their powers, violating constitutional rights to the effective judicial protection to the defense and due process of the parties in criminal trial. ”
Based on these reasoning, the Constitutional Chamber annulled the decision of the Court of Appeals, maintained the validity of the deprivation of liberty for the eleven police and ordered that the corresponding arrest warrants be freed to be followed so that the trial is followed after the bars.
This is the identity of the eleven prosecuted police officers
1) Jesús Alberto Bermúdez Rivero,
2) Mario Antonio Aparicio González,
3) Francisco Javier Núñez Hernández,
4) Pedro Luis Salazar Paz,
5) Carlos Luis Ríos Vílchez,
6) Marco Antonio Gómez Millán,
7) Yimmy de Jesús Reverol Chacín,
8) Franshelys María Mendoza Briceño,
9) Jelvin Douglas Marín Valbuena,
10) Jhimmy José Gelis Márquez
11) Jeffery Jordán Montilla Cárdenas
