The Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice left unscathed the sentence imposed on three officials of the Bolivarian National Guard accused of murdering a man who was protesting in Tucapé, Cárdenas municipality (Táriba), Táchira state, according to sentence 363 drafted by the magistrate Maikel Moreno.
The soldiers prosecuted are Yelfrin Junior Carmona Milán, José Gregorio Rodríguez Peña and Brayan Edgardo Lemus Rivas, attached to Regional Detachment No. 21 of the Bolivarian National Guard Pueblo Nuevo, Táchira state.
The events occurred on May 17, 2017 when the agents went to the Antonio José de Sucre highway, the entrance to Tucapé where one of the protests called by the opposition was taking place with a view to removing President Nicolás Maduro from power.
In that place there was a confrontation between the military agents and the demonstrators who threw stones, sticks and bottles, says the sentence. The uniformed men responded by firing their weapons, mortally wounding Manuel Felipe Castellano Molina, who later died in the central hospital of San Cristóbal, capital of Táchira.
The trial against the three soldiers took place between June 22 and September 8, 2021, when they were sentenced to 10 years and six months in prison, for the crimes of simple intentional homicide and use of an organic weapon, according to the ruling of the Court 4 of Tachira Trial.
The private lawyers for the military, Milagros del Valle García Martínez and Eliana Lucía Fernández Peñaloza, appealed the decision, alleging that the trial court based their sentence on “false assumptions and the biased assessments of other testimonies.” In addition, they denounced that “the only wound that the deceased had had was caused by a firearm other than the ones that were collected from my defendants at the time of the event.”
The Táchira Court of Appeals dismissed the complaints, but modified the sentence imposed on the military, reducing it by six months, resulting in 10 years in prison.
But, in the same way, the private defense went to the Criminal Chamber with the same arguments presented before the Court of Appeals of Táchira.
The magistrates analyzed the appeal for cassation and detected a “lack of technique” in denouncing the alleged lack of motivation for the conviction.
In this regard, the Criminal Chamber determined that the defenders of the military failed to state what the alleged vice consisted of, and they did not even express what its significance is, “so there is no evidence of compliance with the formalization technique that must have the appeal”.
For this reason, the Chamber dismissed the military’s position as “manifestly unfounded”, leaving unscathed the sentence handed down against them.
