The Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice left unscathed the 30-year prison sentence imposed after a trial on Luis Enrique Fernández Fernández, accused of continuously raping his teenage stepdaughter.
Such a decision is reflected in sentence 583 written by Judge Carmen Marisela Castro and validated by her colleagues from the Criminal Chamber, Elsa Gómez and Maikel Moreno.
The events occurred in the house where the victim, her mother and the perpetrator lived, located in the town of Santa Cruz de Mara, Principal Street, San Rafael parish, Mara municipality, Zulia state.
These facts were exposed for the first time through a statement given by the 13-year-old victim on March 11, 2020 before the Fourth Court of Control, Hearings and Measures of Zulia. In that instance, the teenager reported that she was a victim of sexual abuse by Luis Fernández “and that this happened when her mother was working, since she is a Mathematics teacher and that is when he took the opportunity to abuse her repeatedly in the home she shared with her mother.”
Following that statement, the subject was arrested and handed over to the Public Ministry whose representatives presented him before the 4th Court of Control, Hearings and Measures in Matters of Crimes of Violence Against Women of Zulia where they proceeded to charge him with aggravated and continuous sexual abuse of adolescents and resistance to authority.
Subsequently, specifically on March 17, 2020, the Public Ministry requested to open a trial against Fernández, an approach that was agreed on December 2, 2020 by the 4th Court of Control, Hearings and Measures in Matters of Crimes of Violence Against Women of the Criminal Judicial Circuit of the state of Zulia.
That trial took place between March 21, 2023 and April 29, 2024, the date on which the 11th Trial Court for Crimes of Violence against Women found Fernández guilty and sentenced him to 30 years in prison.
Such conviction was corroborated on August 26, 2024 by the Court of Appeals of the Adolescent Section with Jurisdiction in Matters of Crimes of Violence Against Women of Zulia. By virtue of this, the public defender Jhean Carlos González, assigned to Fernández, filed an appeal in which he raised a series of complaints that led to the request for the annulment of the conviction and holding a new trial.
But when these complaints were analyzed, the magistrates detected that the defense lawyer of the convicted person did not make “the proposal of a complaint in accordance with the requirements established in the criminal adjective norm, in which a defect or violation that requires examination by this Chamber is revealed, only a series of details are evident referring to what the course of the debate was, which is not for this Chamber to elucidate.”
In this context, the magistrates recalled that “the Criminal Cassation Chamber cannot infer or interpret the claims of the plaintiffs, since they are the ones who must precisely and clearly substantiate the requirements that they hope to be resolved.”
Based on these criteria, the Criminal Chamber dismissed the appeal and left unscathed the 30-year prison sentence imposed on Luis Enrique Fernández, who was found guilty of having sexually abused his stepdaughter.
