translated from Spanish: Postpone trial of raped girl in Zacatecas; lawyer denounces irregularities

A girl from Zacatecas, just entering adolescence, would celebrate her birthday on the first weekend of April. He went to the home of relatives in the municipality of Guadalupe and was receiving visits from friends. An acquaintance a few years older, aged 16, told her that she had a gift and went to pick her up when it was night. But what must have been a celebration ended on a nightmare day at a Public Prosecution Service, where she spent hours reporting that he had injured and sexually raped her in various ways.
This Thursday would be the trial, scheduled just three days earlier, to issue sentencing or release the alleged assailant; this second option was the biggest fear of the family and his lawyer, Mara Muñoz, who has reported various irregularities in the investigation and prosecution of the case. But upon the request for an amparo, a federal judge granted a provisional stay of the trial, which will have to be resolved by September 21, because the law marks that a teenager cannot spend more than five months in detention without a sentence.
It all started when the boy passed through her in a car and gave her alcohol until she lost consciousness. Then he took her elsewhere, subdued her and penetrated through different ways. Her relatives had tried to call her, but she did not answer, until they finally saw the car return, already in the morning, with her asking for help. They held the alleged assailant until a patrol arrived: as the violent act was still ongoing at the time, Muñoz explained in interview, it is legally considered to be a flagrance arrest.
Read: Judge suspended for ‘ineptitude and carelessness’ in case of a girl’s rape
But in the investigation, he criticized, a cell number that is not his, but his mother’s, was asked to geolocate, so it turns out that the boy was allegedly not in the scene that night, despite the arrest in flagrance. The defense attorney, Jesús Alberto Gaytán told Animal Politics that just as the victim’s relatives held the teenager’ phone and that’s why they now say it’s not that.
From there the police took everyone involved to testify. It could not be at the Women’s Justice Center, because at that time it was closed, so they went with the Ministerial Police, where the acts the lawyer has claimed as violations of the child’s human rights began: first she and her family spent the whole night in the same room as the alleged assailant and her parents , until 10 a.m., they began to perform medical tests and make a statement.
Then the whole stagecoach process that day ended at 8 o’clock at night, so the girl went more than a whole day without sleep.
Other irregularities in the investigation, Muñoz explained, was that no fingerprints were taken from the car where the two teenagers traveled. Nor were they sent to do genetic DNA confrontations of the detainee with the sperm collected in the victim’s clothing and body parts, on the grounds that they were not sufficient for that procedure, although only one is sufficient, the lawyer said.
When he initiated the legal process, the defendant had an advocate of his own motion. But in July he took the Gaystan case and according to the victim’s legal adviser, everything got worse, as he has influenced by having been Director of Investigations of the then local Attorney General until 2010. Accusations that he resealed in this medium arguing that Muñoz was also a civil servant of the Attorney General’s Office, as she worked in the founding of the Justice Center for Women in 2016 and the creation of femicide agencies.
The new lawyer filed a medical record that has been a source of controversy between the two legal advisers. The most recent sheet dates July 7, when the defendant was already in a teenage detention center, so Muñoz asked the authorities there to certify whether the young man left or received some form of medical care and they confirmed that they did not, and even the judge accepted the notification that it did not. But Gaytan argued that that date is not from a doctor’s appointment, but simply from when the copy of the medical record was issued.
The importance of that document is that he points out that the boy has various congenital medical conditions that would have prevented him from committing the rape. But Muñoz reported that this was forged because it aggravates the defendant’s condition, so even IMSS, he said, notified him that he initiated an internal investigation into it.
Another sign from the lawyer was that the Public Prosecutor’s Office called for an extension of the girl’s gynecological tests and it turns out that if she had certified that the sexual injury had occurred recently, it is now indicated that they were earlier than the day of the complaint.
Therefore, she considered that there is possible corruption if the MP itself is discrediting the evidence in favor of the victim, nor did she want to accept the claim for further investigation into the authenticity of the IMSS medical record filed by the defense, and herself asked for the defendant’s clinical record but twice did so under the name of the misser misspelled, so there were no results on the search.
Faced with this series of incidents and with the haste that Monday had been settled trial for Thursday, it was that Muñoz, supported by several feminist organizations, decided to make public the case that was about to be tried.
At a virtual press conference on Tuesday, the victim’s mother was present, without revealing her identity, and unable to articulate a word because, she said, she couldn’t stop crying, so it was another family member who said they only ask for justice, and regretted that a $30,000 payment for psychological therapy sessions is also being fixed as repair of the damage.
“I am relative to the victim. I want to share with you some of what I have seen in her, for from the day of the event until these dates, I want to share with you that she has lost all the joy that she had, all enthusiasm; the girl doesn’t sleep, she doesn’t eat, she’s always locked in her room. The psychological damage done to the girl is serious and irreparable.”
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Original source in Spanish