Judge Juan Carlos Peinado can’t write well. He does not know the uses of capital letters, punctuation, concordances, the appropriateness of gerunds, the relationship between sentences, the narrative thread. Plain language doesn’t suit him.
It is difficult to suppose that someone suffering from these defects became a magistrate-judge of Madrid’s investigative court number 41, where he tried a minister and the president’s wife.
The 32-page resolution with which he raised his charges of perjury and embezzlement against Félix Bolaños before the Supreme Court, signed on June 23, is a mess of exposition that begins with a sentence of no less than 166 words (an entire paragraph: 12 lines wide), followed by another of 161 (the second complete paragraph, 13 lines long).
(So far this column adds up to 138 words total, so you can get an idea.)
The aforementioned second paragraph of the ordinance contains seven additional commas, freely scattered; In the third (of 6 lines), five remain. In the fourth (of 8), six commas… and so on. In another 26 line sentence! There are 21 incorrect commas scattered about, which together with the intricate writing turn reading into a difficult ordeal. Commas between subject and verb, between verb and complement. Absurd commas.
Such convoluted sentences obscure arguments, even if paragraphs are reread to discern between main sentences and extended appositions, with inconsistencies like this: “There was a procedural necessity to proceed to the opening of a separate piece (…) derived from the indicated opening of the separate piece.”
But in sheets 8 and 9, which recall the regulation of false testimony, the punctuation becomes pristine. This leads us to suspect (and confirm) that it comes from someone else’s hand, due to a cutter of other similar resolutions. However, on sheet 10 the mess reappears; and after another three impeccable pages, on page 15 the disaster returns: “(…) That this fact was denied, by the said character, Raúl Díaz Silva, when he testified, on two occasions, as a witness and under oath, on the 14th and the 28th”. (…) “And what constitutes the main evidence, for this Reasoned Exposition to be raised, for the crime of perjury in a judicial case, in addition to the crime of embezzlement.”
Page 21 contains the testimony of a witness, but with 96 consecutive lines, without delimiting the turns of intervention; without lines of dialogue or periods, almost always without the opening question mark and sometimes with it but without the closing one, so much so that it is often not possible to distinguish who is asking and who is answering.
These same errors are repeated in the order signed by the same judge on September 23, where a second base is read with a 220-word sentence in which I cannot discern what the main verb is.
Some may wonder why I focus on this magistrate and not others. Oh, are there others who write the same? More in my favor. Because then it becomes even more fundamental for the Judiciary to dust off the Report for the modernization of legal language (2010) and require all judges to comply. And that access to a judicial career requires written tests that evaluate the ability to reason clearly, on paper and not with oral and mechanical answers that catch air. It would have been good to intercept in time the linguistic incompetence (thermometer of other evils) of those who argue, condemn or absolve with words; and whose expository negligence constitutes contempt for citizens and provides clues to the mental chaos with which they are supposed to do justice.
