The family of Adrián Mastandrea demonstrated on Wednesday in front of the Supreme Court of Justice (SCJ) denouncing that The Prosecutor’s Office “is managed with total impunity” and “without the guarantees of due process” in the case for which he was sentenced in 2021 to eight years in prison for rape, private violence and robbery as a result of an episode that occurred in September 2019.
According to a witness at the time, she saw a couple in front of her house, the man ran out and she went to talk to the woman, who told her that he had raped and sexually abused her. However, the witness later declared before Judge Marcelo Malvar that the prosecutor for Sexual Crimes Sylvia Lovesio had “manipulated” her. and made her believe that “she was a heroine” for supposedly having saved the raped woman.
She had “a lot of doubts” about what really happened, she told the defense during the trial.
Protest
In this sense, the family argued this Wednesday that “a cause of abuse (and) theft was invented” when “it was all with consent” between Mastandrea, 20 years old, and a neighbor 20 years older, of foreign nationality. According to what they indicated, it was an “occasional relationship”, consensual and behind the back of
“The whole neighborhood saw them, there are footage and witnesses who saw them and they have not been accepted by the Prosecutor’s Office (…) We cannot understand how they can make such a bad mistake when the footage is in,” they asserted.
Likewise, the defense filed a complaint against the victim for extortion, which led the 2nd shift Flagrancia Prosecutor’s Office to re-examine the case, a mechanism to which the defense is enabled once a case is filed and claims arise. .
“We only ask for justice and that what we are saying be investigated by you, the ministers of the Supreme Court of Justice”, they concluded in the speech.
They went to the SCJ with banners with the slogan “Freedom for Adrián” or “Adrián is innocent!”
Diego Battiste
The family of the convicted went to the Supreme Court of Justice and filed an appeal
court instance
Also, the defense of Mastandrea filed an appeal on Thursday against the ruling issued on July 21 “because the Court incurred in erroneous application of the law of form and substance.”
In this instance, asks for a sentence of acquittal.
“The Defense does not have to prove the innocence of the accused, it is enough to show that there is a reasonable doubt that he is guilty so that an acquittal sentence must be issued. In this matter, the judgment of second instance disregards the regulations that determine the obligation to eradicate any reasonable doubt in order to maintain a sentence of conviction that is based on equivocal indications and on statements that are not at all conclusive about the occurrence of the facts that would have typified the crimes. attributed to the accused”, reads the document presented.
In this way, it is argued that the The Prosecutor’s Office could not prove “without a doubt” the existence of violence or threats in the link between Mastandrea and the complainant, something she should have done.
At the level of the forensic expertise, “there is no element” that arises from this instance that leads one to think that the hypothesis of forced sex “is preferable” to that of consensual sex. Faced with this doubt, “the sentence of acquittal must have fallen,” says the defense.
Reference is also made to the testimony of the witness and it is stated that she herself “ended up declaring what prosecutor Lovesio asked her to do”which the defense understands as “very serious” and that “cannot be left uninvestigated.”
The evidence for which he was convicted
According to the victim’s account, she was waiting for the bus to go to work at 5:30 in the morning at the same stop as every day. There, Mastandrea took her from behind and led her to her open space where he raped her and tried to suffocate her. She complained and asked for water; together they went to a kiosk where she bought a soft drink and tried to make some sign asking for help, although she was not well understood by the cyclist who was passing by. Trying to show that they were a couple, he tried to lead her towards a square, but she tried to go in the opposite direction.
They then scuffled, she offered him $1,000, and he let her go.
The convicted man said that it was a clandestine relationship, consensual and behind the back of his wife who was working in the interior of the country.
The psychological expertise determined that the perpetrator has a personality border lineinfantile thinking and high impulsivity. The victim, on her part, after the fact, her mental and social life was affected, according to the report of the experts who interviewed her. That has prevented him from going back to work.
In addition, there is a series of images that, in Malvar’s opinion, made the victim’s statement plausible. One of them is the gestures he made to the cyclist when they were in front of the kiosk where they bought the soda. The cyclist replied that he did not understand what he was saying and she put her finger to her lips asking her to be quiet. Then, there is another footage that shows that on two occasions the victim tried to go to the bus stop and the man stopped him.
According to the judge, the defense could not prove his hypothesis, “he could only point out the defects of the investigation”, but these, in his opinion, are not enough to eliminate the accusation. He also stressed that his version is not credible.
