Two convicted of 37-year sentences for killing Los Andes student in Bogotá
Criminal Judge 801 of Bogotá convicted Juan Carlos Suárez and Ricardo González of the aggravated homicide of Jaime Esteban Moreno. Both will receive 450 months in prison.
Trial for death of Los Andes student concludes with 37-and-a-half-year sentence
Criminal Judge 801 of the Bogotá Circuit convicted Juan Carlos Suárez Ortiz and Ricardo Rafael González Castro as co-perpetrators of the aggravated homicide of Jaime Esteban Moreno Jaramillo, an engineering student at Los Andes University. According to elespectador.com, the ruling came after nearly a year of trial and imposed a sentence of 450 months in prison—equivalent to 37 years and six months—after it was established that the victim was attacked while defenceless.
Given the length of the sentence, Suárez Ortiz and González Castro will remain confined in a penitentiary centre whose assignment is the responsibility of the Inpec.
Widespread dissatisfaction: the majority of parties announced appeals
Despite the severity of the sentence, the decision left almost all parties in the proceedings dissatisfied. The Public Prosecutor's Office, the victims' lawyers and the defence attorneys of the convicted men announced they would appeal the ruling; only the Ombudsman's Office expressed satisfaction with the determination. The judge opened a virtual space for Wednesday at 4:30 p.m., so that each party could present their arguments of dissatisfaction. Subsequently, the case file will be passed to the Criminal Division of the Superior Court of Bogotá for review.
The sequence of the attack, according to the judicial office
According to the reconstruction of events, the attack occurred around 3:25 in the morning, after Jaime Esteban Moreno Jaramillo and his friend Juan David Cárdenas Ortiz left the Bifor Pub establishment and sought transport to return home. During this journey, Juan Carlos Suárez Ortiz began to attack Jaime Esteban. Although the victim attempted to get away, he was pursued and caught again.
Juan David intervened on several occasions to protect his friend and separate the attacker, but Ricardo Rafael González Castro also joined in the attack. The decisive moment came when Jaime Esteban fell to the ground and was unable to get up: rather than stopping, the two accused men continued hitting him.
After evaluating testimony, videos and forensic medical evidence, the judicial office concluded that the responsibility of both had been proven beyond all doubt.
Defencelessness, the central aggravating factor in the ruling
The judge's analysis focused on the progressive loss of defensive capacity on the part of the victim. The official noted that Jaime Esteban was not initially incapable of resisting, but rather it was the very sequence of blows and the pursuit that reduced his defensive options until they were completely eliminated.
When he fell to the ground, the victim could no longer get up or escape. Nevertheless, the accused men continued to attack him. For the judicial office, that conduct falls under the seventh numeral of article 104 of the Penal Code, which provides as an aggravating circumstance of homicide placing a person in a situation of defencelessness or taking advantage of such a situation to commit the crime.
The judge was emphatic that it was not enough to establish that two people had attacked one person: what was decisive was that Jaime Esteban was physically incapacitated, with no effective possibility of escaping or defending himself, whilst both men retained the capacity to continue hitting him.
The role of third-party accusations
Another element examined during the trial was the motivation that led to the attack. According to the statement of witness Valentina Paricet Peña Castañeda, a woman dressed in black identified Jaime Esteban as an alleged harasser. Those assertions, according to the judicial analysis, generated a dynamic of incitement that preceded the attack.
The judicial office clarified that it was not its responsibility to determine whether or not there had been prior harassing behaviour on the part of the victim, as that matter was not the subject of the proceedings. What it did find to be established was that the accused men took the third-party accusations as justification for exercising violence, despite the fact that Jaime Esteban did not pose an immediate threat.
The ruling also made reference to a statement attributed to Suárez Ortiz, who reportedly said he would hit the victim again if people present encouraged him to do so. For the judge, that conduct reflected the intention to impose punishment on his own account, without verifying the accusations or resorting to the authorities. For that reason, the judicial office found established the circumstance of greater punishability for acting with an abject motive, provided for in article 58 of the Penal Code.
Final decision, pending the Superior Court
With the appeal announced by almost all parties, the first-instance sentence has not become final. The magistrates of the Criminal Division of the Superior Court of Bogotá will have the final say on the conviction of Juan Carlos Suárez Ortiz and Ricardo Rafael González Castro for the death of Jaime Esteban Moreno Jaramillo.
Source: Google News CO — Crime