Just a week after the president of the Criminal Chamber, Andrés Martínez Arrieta, pronounced the “sentence of conviction”, the seven judges of the Supreme Court on Thursday advanced the ruling of a historic conviction of the State Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz. The Court has become fragmented, as has happened to the Second Chamber in recent decisions of a more political nature. A majority of five deputies voted in favor of a two-year ban from the position of head of the Public Prosecutor’s Office for the crime of revealing procedural secrets against the partner of the President of the Community of Madrid, Alberto González Amador. Progressive justices Susana Polo and Ana Ferrer will write a dissenting opinion and the ruling will be made public “as soon as possible.”
The deliberations of the tribunal – composed of Andrés Martínez Arrieta (current president of the chamber), Juan Ramón Berdugo, Manuel Marchena, Antonio del Moral, Carmen Lamela, Ferrer and Polo – began on the same day the trial ended, according to legal sources. Some voices point out that, even during the two weeks of hearings, some points were discussed, such as the questions of nullity raised by García Ortiz’s defense at the beginning of the trial.
The magistrates in recent days have “switched roles” and have built a dam around themselves to prevent any type of leak of information. Over the years, during the presidency of Manuel Marchena, the Criminal Chamber has mostly acted as a bloc, as the drafting of individual opinions in more complex sentences is not common.
This happened, for example, with such a political trial as the one that ended with the conviction of members of the A processes in October 2019. The court then set itself the objective of achieving unanimity and the attitude that Marchena maintained in his mandate to unite the different sensitivities ended up stitching together the theories of all the magistrates around the same sentence. Also present in that court were Antonio del Moral, Andrés Martínez Arrieta, Juan Ramón Berdugo and Ana Ferrer. But this time, with the attorney general, the latter distanced himself from the majority.
The agreement between all the robes was maintained that same year, in June 2019, with the case of La Manada. The ruling finds that the sexual assault of five friends on a young woman in the 2016 Sanfermines was not abuse but rather gang rape. The court jointly applied the aggravating circumstance which increased the punishment for the attackers in a court in which Martínez Arrieta, Ana Ferrer and Susana Polo also participated. And the same thing happened in February 2021 with the interpretation of the hall at the law of only yes is yes agree whether the modification of the punitive scope of the law should lead to a reduction of the sentence in certain cases. The whole room acted together.
But that harmony began to break down after the ruling on the matter the ERE in 2022. The Criminal Chamber was then divided by three votes to two, in fact, against both Susana Polo and Ana Ferrer. And the gap continued in July 2024 with one of the most political issues of this legislature: the amnesty law. In that case, five magistrates understood that the embezzlement for which the pro-independence leaders had been convicted was not amnestiable and Ferrer, once again, voted against it, understanding that “the only reasonable interpretation of the Law” was the forgiveness of those crimes.
In bodies such as the Constitutional Court – whose members are directly elected by the government, Congress, Senate or judiciary – the division according to which progressives and conservatives historically vote in watertight blocs was more visible, especially in matters of greater media importance. But several members of the Supreme Court recently expressed regret that the courtroom’s consensus prosecuting those with jurisdiction had been broken. It failed in the last phase of the Marchena presidency and does not appear to have been fully rebuilt under the current Arrieta presidency as of December 2024.
Quick resolution
The State Attorney General’s decision on the case was reproduced in the same terms as on these last cited occasions. The two progressive justices, Ferrer and Polo, disagreed with their colleagues and, therefore, the majority of the court ruled that a change of speaker was necessary. Initially, Susana Polo wrote the sentence, but now President Andrés Martínez Arrieta will do so.
This change has raised fears within the Chamber of a possible leak of information on the meaning of the sentence. According to legal sources, President Martínez Arrieta listened to the opinion of the judges on whether or not to advance the sentence and the majority was in favor of doing so to avoid suspicion. If it were known within the Supreme Court that it was the president’s team who wrote the sentence and not Polo’s, one could speculate on the meaning of the sentence, taking the writing of the sentence away from the progressive magistrate.
The speed with which the court made the sentence clear aroused some surprise in some sectors of the Prosecutor’s Office, even if within the High Court they do not give it relevance and explain that there are deliberations that are completed in a single day and this process was not particularly complex. After a group of these magistrates went out this Thursday to have a coffee near the Plaza de las Salesas, the organ’s press office published a sentence that reads: “We must and do condemn Mr. Álvaro García Ortiz, Attorney General of the State, as the perpetrator of the crime of revealing confidential data, article 417.1 of the Penal Code.”
