Jury to judges in the Lucía Pérez case: the victim’s family challenged the Prosecutor for lack of gender perspective

The Jury of Prosecution of Magistrates and Officials of the province of Buenos Aires, had today the first hearing of the political trial against Pablo Viñas and Facundo Gómez Urso, members of the Oral Criminal Court No. 1 of Mar del Plata, responsible for acquitting the femicides of Lucía Pérez. However, the hearing was suspended due to the recusal against prosecutor Marcelo Lapargo presented by the family of the teenager murdered in 2016 for lack of gender perspective. The judges were accused of “negligence, breach of office and manifest partiality”, because in the 2018 ruling they sentenced Matías Farías, Juan Pablo Offidiani and Alejandro Maciel for drug possession but acquitted the defendants in the charges of femicide and sexual abuse and justified it by focusing on the life of the young woman. This morning in the annex building of the Buenos Aires Senate, on 7th and 49th streets, in La Plata, the beginning of the hearings against the magistrates was expected, where different social organizations, women and diversities, students of the UNLP, gathered under the slogan “Justice for Lucía Pérez”. Finally, Marta Montero, Lucía’s mother, announced that the hearings were suspended due to a request filed by the family for recusal against the prosecutor, Marcelo Lapargo. “It’s very hard and very painful when you think you’re reaching the finish line and you run beyond. It is very tiring for families. For us it is not a game, for us it is a daughter who has been killed, “said Montero.In addition, he explained that they had not been informed previously who the prosecutor was, so when they found out, they understood that it was “a prosecutor from San Martín, with a way of being and thinking different from the one we have from the gender perspective, He does not have it or is not interested,” and sentenced: “If this prosecutor has this thought, how can he be in a case in which two judges who did not rule with a gender perspective with a 16-year-old girl are going to be tried, what is being raised is incongruous.”

Original source in Spanish