The lawyer Gerardo González Riega, defense of the priest José Luis Díaz Cruz, the deacon Raúl Antonio Vega González and the seminarian Melkin Antonio Centeno Sequeira, filed an appeal before the judge of the Fifth District of Criminal Hearings of Managua for the initial hearing held last October 7 to the religious, where the Prosecutor’s Office presented a formal accusation against the defendants, who did not have “the right to defense,” revealed the The Mosaic Informative Magazine.
The Ortega prosecutor Manuel de Jesús Rugama was in charge of presenting the accusation against the priest, the deacon, the seminarian and 4 other religious from Matagalpa, to whom they attribute the alleged crimes of conspiracy to undermine national integrity and spread news false through information and communication technologies, to the detriment of society and the State of Nicaragua.
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In addition, at the initial hearing, Rugama asked the sanctioned judge Nalia Nadezhda Úbeda Obando for additional time to complete the investigation against the priests.
The brief, to which Mosaico Magazine had access, also points out that “it is a process in which the Prosecutor’s Office has unnecessarily used all possible procedures to lengthen the process: 1) It requested additional time to carry out a complementary investigation, after more than ten days without formalizing the detention, but having an effective deprivation of liberty on them».
“He also requested, without adherence to the legal exceptions, taking into account the criminal types charged, that the process be given a complex procedure, doubling the terms and practically imposing an ‘early sentence’ on my defendants and without considering these petitions, true delaying tactics” , indicates.
It adds that, “regarding the request to postpone the hearing at least until the terms of the accusation were known by this defense, it generates in the judge, suspicion that it is a delaying tactic, to the detriment of the prosecuted and the minimum guarantee of due process to guarantee those prosecuted, at least the right to defense. The Judge could well postpone the hearing for two hours, guaranteeing the defenses access to the accusation and to a private and free interview with the defendants».
The defense attorney Gerardo González also insists that up to now he has not had access to the file of the defendants and mainly to the accusation, despite the fact that it has been requested on numerous occasions.
«As of today (October 17), and this can be verified by the Criminal Chamber of Appeal, requesting a report from the Office of File of Matters in Process that, day by day, individually and collectively, the defenses have requested access to the file and punctually of the accusation. This supposes a serious injury to the right to defense and this must be declared, “reads the document.
