The agency also reports that from August 2020 to July 2021, 96,268 advisories were provided to people related to preliminary investigations and investigation files initiated by the Mexico City Attorney General’s Office, so that, with their intervention, the freedom of 2,496 people in the ministerial headquarters; that is, only 1%.
The day of a public defender
Said López Govea, a criminal lawyer and former public defender, said in an interview that these officials are assigned to the victim assistance units of the capital government and the Mexico City Prosecutor’s Office, as well as to the public ministry agencies and the Units of Administrative Management (UGA) located in prisons.
He said that when a person is detained and asks for a public defender ex officio, the public ministry must request it through a program called the Interoperability System of Procedural Actions (SIAP) and this in turn automatically assigns a lawyer, It will depend on the criminal type.
“The crimes (are) serious, not serious, of a complaint, but when you have matters that are of a different nature, then you go to the east (prison), to the south or to Santa Martha if it is female (…). What happened to us is that every day your role is arriving and you are going to cover room three, room five and those that arrive, that is, you do not have five minutes to study an investigation folder, ”he described.
He pointed out that carrying out a defense strategy for a case in criminal matters goes much further than reading an investigation folder, because just as the public ministry collects expert opinions, test data, testimonies or any other element that strengthens its position, a Private lawyer is obliged to have different aspects to defend his client.
On the other hand, a public defender, having little time to investigate dozens of cases a day, the only thing he will look for in a trial is to save time. To do this, it will try to locate contradictions in the research folder.
“The public defender does not go for one, he goes for five or seven hearings in a single day, obviously he ends up with an empty investigation folder or with few elements. It is materially impossible to have time to study and investigate so many cases, but it is also necessary to understand that the public defender is handcuffed”, he explained.
