The Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice dismissed two appeals seeking to annul the 30-year prison sentence imposed on three officials of the Bolivarian National Police accused of kidnapping a worker.
Such decision is contained in sentence 633 written by Judge Maikel Moreno
and validated by her colleagues, Carmen Marisela Castro and Elsa Gómez.
The events occurred on June 14, 2022 in Parque Central, Caracas, when a PNB commission took away in the same vehicle two people who were working installing or repairing air conditioners identified as Irno Trías Istúriz and Rubino Vicente Sanz Lara. The police officers who took these workers are: José Manuel Arteta Azócar, Jhoan David Fonseca Lugo and Alejandro Villalobos Núñez.
These police officers contacted the daughter of Irno, one of the kidnapped people, who was told that she had to pay the sum of 200 dollars to free her father. She accepted but then reported the incident to the PNB from where they prepared a controlled delivery of the money.
The officials who had kidnapped the workers changed the location several times to receive the dollars from Irno’s daughter. Until they finally summoned her to
the Great Wall of Petare, where the PNB commission took them, captured them and released the victims.
After the detainees were charged, prosecutor Katherine Anaís Chávez Contreras requested on August 1, 2022 to open a trial for the crimes of aggravated kidnapping in
quality of co-authors, aggravated robbery and association.
Such petition was partially approved on September 27, 2022 by the 36th Court of
Control of Caracas from where they ordered a trial to be opened for the crimes of aggravated kidnapping and aggregation. He dismissed the crimes of association and robbery.
The trial took place between November 15, 2023 and March 9, 2023, when they were sentenced to the maximum penalty.
That sentence was ratified on July 19 by Chamber 10 of the Court of Appeals of Caracas. For this reason, they went to the Criminal Chamber of the TSJ where they filed complaints about alleged irregularities in the holding of the trial.
One of the complaints was that the 14th Trial Court of Caracas had wrongly applied the law by convicting them of an allegedly unproven crime such as kidnapping. The defense attorneys admitted that there were some facts that deserved legal punishment as they were an “illegal police procedure” that did not constitute kidnapping.
“In the crime of kidnapping, generally the perpetrators, with the aim of obtaining profit (note that the profit motive is present before the executive acts and not before), plan, monitor the victim, deprive of liberty, captivate and they make contact with the victim’s family to request his ransom,” say the defense lawyers of the police officials.
“In the present case, none of these preparatory acts has been proven, for the reason that
On the contrary, it is a lawful police procedure that triggers subsequent acts
of corruption by requesting a sum of money to not prosecute the victims,” admits the
defense of the police.
The magistrates rejected such allegations and recalled that the appeal of cassation is not
to air matters of the trial.
With that argument, the magistrates left the maximum sentence imposed on Fonseca, Villalobos and Arteta unscathed.
