In 2007, the provincial court of Seville sentenced a man identified only as M. to 14 years in prison for repeatedly abusing his own daughter. The Supreme Court rejected his appeal on 8 November, but M. never set foot inside the penitentiary because he vanished from the village where he lived, although a few neighbours claim to have seen him. Santiago del Valle, who allegedly murdered a five-year-old girl named Mari Luz Cortés in Huelva last month, was not the only convicted paedophile who is walking around free. Ignacio Fernández de la Mata, a lawyer who represented the victim, is still waiting to be notified about M.'s imprisonment for sexually abusing his daughter for six years - from the time she turned eight. "Four days ago he was still a free man. I don't understand why, but that's the way it is," he said. "I wasn't at all surprised by the Mari Luz case. The system does not work, there is a shortage of courthouses and resources."Deputy prime minister María Teresa Fernández de la Vega on Friday admitted that the justice system failed Mari Luz.
But M.'s situation, as well as that of another convicted paedophile in Lleida who went missing over a year ago, proves that the system is failing too often for comfort. Last Friday, Seville's courts stated that delays in implementing prison sentences are no exception, blaming the situation on insufficient resources.
There is something truly astonishing about Santiago del Valle's record. Each courthouse that he walked into worked like an isolated island, as if it had no connection with the rest of the legal system; a place where the repeat offender kept appearing as if it were the first time.
Is it really possible for a judge in Gijón to not know immediately whether a colleague in Tarragona has taken any measures against a paedophilia suspect? Can he not simply press a button and access a suspect's record? The answer is no.
"In 2008 we cannot allow a judge from Almería who is going to rule over the fate of a suspect to do so without knowing what another judge has ruled," says Antonio García Martínez, a judge at the Superior Court of Justice of the Basque Country and spokesman for the Professional Judges' Association. "We need a system that enables us to instantly know what is going on with specific people and cases."
Communications have developed faster than the courts. The only records that a judge can access immediately are those cases where there is a final verdict. That is why, when a second Seville judge convicted Del Valle in 2004 for sexual abuse, he did not treat him as a repeat offender. The 2002 sentence for abusing his own daughter was not included in the records because it had been appealed before the provincial court, which took three years to hand down its verdict.
A centralised database containing all legal sentences relating to a case would prevent offenders such as Santiago del Valle from staying out of prison. The matter raises other issues as well, such as the right to privacy. But it is one thing to create a database for judges, attorneys and law enforcement agencies, and another to create a public record of paedophilia offenders, as some people are demanding. The legal profession, in general, defends only the first possibility. "It would have to be a database with restricted access for people with a legitimate interest," says Jaime Tapia, a spokesman for the progressive judge association Jueces para la Democracia.
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