The Association of Criminal Lawyers came to the crossroads of Romina Celeste Papasso and her lawyer Soledad Suárez for the accusations brought against the defender of the militant Sebastián Mauvezín, Juan Carlos Fernández Lecchini. The penalists considered that the manifestations of both were “unfair and reprehensible.”
Suárez, a lawyer from the Legal Clinic of the University of the Republic (Udelar), had spoken with Montevideo Portal after learning that Fernández Lecchini was asking to know the names of the victims who appeared before the prosecutor Alicia Ghione for the case she has in the center of the controversy against white senator Gustavo Penadés.
“All the alarms go off for me, I always have to protect the victims, but now more than ever. Why do you want to access the name of the minors? It is a question, that everyone draws their conclusions ”, Suárez had told Montevideo Portal.
His client, Romina Celeste Papasso, posted on her Twitter account: “What do you want to call them to threaten them? I am the visible face of all of them, Be careful not to mess with the clown victims (sic), who already told me the kind of garbage you are. Mess with me, coward, not with 15-year-old boys, rubbish (sic), the defendants that you defend with pride did him enough damage“Wrote the militant in capital letters.
The Association of Criminal Lawyers considered that “they are part of a series of expressions that have been made systematically against the professional performance of lawyers who have assumed the defense of defendants in proceedings for sexual crimes and that not only intend to affect their image but also also illegitimately limit the way in which they exercise their rights and obligations”.
The union pointed out that the questioning of those who claim to know the names of the complainants supposes “ignoring the elementary duty that any lawyer has” to know “in order to adequately prepare their defense.” “Knowing who he is, where he says he met him, how he says they communicated, where he says they saw each other, etc., is basic information that any lawyer and his client have the right to know, unless there is a judicial resolution that temporarily prevents it,” they said.
“The statements by Dr. Suárez and her client, who try to attribute malicious intentions or some spurious interest to undue pressure on the complainants to Dr. Fernández Lecchini, are unfair and reprehensible, especially when they refer to a colleague who has had a long and prestigious career as a criminal lawyer and also as a criminal judge”, attacked from the association.
The criminals pointed out that the “Serious attitudes” by Suárez “are even more reprehensible when dealing with a teacher who invokes the representation of the Legal Clinic” of Udelar“from which most of the lawyers of our association graduated, being worrisome that this type of concepts and model of improper behavior are being transmitted to the students, incompatible with the adequate right of defense.”
The association went one step further and ensured that the law School “You cannot sponsor people who publicly insult lawyers in the way you have done” Romina Celeste, and “much less allow the teachers who exercise their sponsorship not make their client adjust their behavior to elementary rules of decorum and respect for the lawyers involved in the case”.
“The association will denounce before the Faculty of Law the serious improper behaviors for the purposes that it adopt the measures that it considers may correspond to those responsible,” they concluded.
