David Sánchez, brother of the President of the Government, has presented a document to the provincial court of Badajoz in which he accuses the three magistrates who will have to judge him starting next February 9 for “lack of objective impartiality” for alleged irregularities in his appointment to the provincial council of Badajoz in 2017. The relative of Pedro Sánchez, for whom the popular accusations ask for three years in prison for one crime of trafficking in influence and another of prevarication, To To this end, he relies on the order issued by the three judges on September 23 to reject the appeals presented by him and the other 10 defendants against his accusation and whose content, in his opinion, contained “value judgments” with an “incriminating prejudice” against him. The members of the tribunal are José Antonio Patrocinio Polo, president of the Provincial Court; Emilio Francisco Serrano Molera, who will be the speaker of the sentence, and Dolores Fernández Gallardo.
Pedro Sánchez’s relative is the second among those tried in the case that contests the members of the tribunal, after Juana Cinta Calderón, head of Human Resources of the Provincial Council of Badajoz, recently did so. Legal sources admit that the chances of either challenge being successful are slim, but add that resolving the incident could delay the start of the hearing. Court magistrates must issue a report so that the Superior Court of Justice of Extremadura can decide whether to accept the appeal or reject it. The trial will take place 50 days after the early elections in Extremadura on December 21, in which another of the defendants, the leader of the PSOE of Extremadura Miguel Ángel Gallardo, will be the head of the socialist list and candidate for the presidency of the Council.
In his recusal memorandum, David Sánchez recalls that the three magistrates “had a proven decision-making intervention” during the investigations of the case since they were responsible for resolving the various appeals presented by the parties. The president’s brother points out that it was precisely in that proceeding that the court showed signs of accepting the conclusions of Judge Beatriz de Biedma, investigator of the case, which, in his opinion, represents “a clear and obvious limitation of the defendant’s contradiction guarantee” during the hearing. In this sense, the paper focuses on the numerous adjectives such as “relevant”, “illustrative” or “excessive” used by the magistrates in that order of 23 September, which, in their opinion, are biased and constitute “indisputably subjective and, in the noblest sense of the term, biased assessments”.
In this sense, he also highlights the use in this resolution of the superlative “very brother” referring to David Sánchez himself, which he considers unjustified since it is “a kind of joke from a third party”, in reference to a witness who referred to him in this way during his testimony in court. “This way of expressing itself constitutes an inappropriate and anachronistic advancement of the evidentiary process”, we read in the brief presented by the president’s brother, who adds that all this demonstrates on the part of the members of the court “a presumption towards the accused of impossible future developments”.
For all these reasons, David Sánchez believes that in that order the court “prejudiced” the facts, made a “subjective evaluation” of them and cast a “shadow of suspicion” on the actions of the defendants to the point of inferring “criminal connivance”. For this reason, the defense of the president’s brother concludes that the September resolution contains “an argument typical of a conviction” and, with it, a component “contaminating the impartiality” that a court is presumed to have. “There is no objective reason to believe that this representation will be able to reverse what the Court has already demonstrated vestibularly, unless the conception of logic varies in the understanding of some of its members, which does not seem foreseen,” predicts in his writing Emilio Bechiarelli, lawyer of David Sánchez.
