This Monday at 9 a.m. hearings are resumed for Operation Ocean that should have been held in October last year, but were postponed after defense attorneys in the case detected that there were witnesses whose testimony was not recorded by the Prosecutor’s Office and that they were missing evidence in the investigative file. On March 22, at a hearing, the lawyer Eduardo Sassón denounced that the Public Ministry wanted to make apocryphal chats between the accused and the victim enter the trial, a reason that again led to the suspension of the hearings, until this Monday.
At this stage, the defense attorneys will leave the general questions of the case to meddle in the particular details of the relations between the main victim and each of the accused. According to sources in the case, The Observerthe lawyers are divided into two according to their strategies. Those who understand that their defendants are not committed to the case and prefer not to ask the victim questions to avoid harming themselves. On the other hand, those who do, want to ask him to try that the testimonies serve to mitigate possible sentences.
The chats between the accused and the victim are one of the main pieces of evidence to be analyzed in the upcoming trial –prosecutor Mariana Alfaro has until May to present an accusation–, but a group of lawyers representing six of the 32 accused presented a written last Thursday to exclude the documentation because it is null and void, reported The Observer.
Given Sassón’s complaint that the Prosecutor’s Office presented apocryphal evidence, a period of 48 hours was opened for Alfaro to send the files with the corrected errors and another 48 hours for the lawyers to verify that the information sent was correct. According to the brief signed by the lawyers Nicolás Pereyra, Martín Frustaci, Santiago Alonso, Pablo Barreiro and Ignacio Durán, and to which he had access The Observerthe team headed by prosecutor Mariana Alfaro sent the documents on the same Wednesday night.
“Since November 2021, the folders with the complete information are available to the defenses of the accused and it is a burden for them to remove them to exercise their right,” says the statement from the Prosecutor’s Office. But defense sources highlighted that currently the investigative file is very extensive – it weighs approximately four terabytes – and that Just as the selection of apocryphal chats had been sent through the official email of the prosecution, it should have been communicated that there was an error that was corrected by the same means.
According to the brief presented by the lawyers this March 31, “verified and collated the documents, several defenders detected that the reports that the Prosecutor’s Office sent in a first instance in the month of October 2021, and later added to his folder in the month of November of the same year, they had been at least modified”. For this reason, they requested that “the documents that are intended to be brought to trial be excluded” and requested that the new elements be sent to the Flagrancia Prosecutor’s Office, which was entrusted with the first complaint for irregularities.
“It is not understandable, nor logical, much less fair and equitable towards the parties to the process, that once again, the Headquarters, grant a new term for the Prosecutor’s Office to amend the omissions in which it incurs,” they claimed.
