Femicide of Candela Rodríguez: Leonardo Jara’s life sentence remains firm

The Supreme Court of Justice ratified that the life sentence of Leonardo Daniel Jara Navarrete is final, for the kidnapping followed by femicide of Candela Rodríguez, the 11-year-old girl who on August 22, 2011 was about to meet some friends, in the Buenos Aires district of Hurlingham.De as reported by the agency Argentinian News (NA), the highest court considered “withdrawn” the last appeal filed by Jara’s defense to annul the sentence. Jara was convicted by the Oral Criminal Court 3 of Morón in 2017 along with Hugo Elbio Bermúdez as co-perpetrators of the crime of “illegal deprivation of coercive liberty followed by death”, within the framework of the first trial that was held in the case where the third defendant, Gabriel Fabián Gómez, was also sentenced to four years as a “secondary participant” in the event. Sentences that were ratified by the Buenos Aires Criminal Court of Cassation at the end of June 2020.Faced with this, the Buenos Aires Supreme Court refused to review the sentence, so Jara Navarrete’s defense appealed in “complaint” to the federal Supreme Court. Thus, on April 26, the condemned man submitted a letter in which he made known his willingness to “desist from the complaint appeal filed,” which was finally rejected as “withdrawn.” The development of the second trial At the beginning of March 2024, a second instance began against Miguel Ángel “Mameluco” Villalba, the main defendant as the main intellectual author of the femicide, who already has a previous sentence of 27 years in prison on a series of drug trafficking cases that he committed in Villa 9 de Julio de San Martín. Along with him, the former Buenos Aires police officer Sergio Fabián Chazarreta; security forces informant Héctor Horacio “Topo” Moreira and carpenter Néstor Ramón Altamirano, all as “co-authors.” However, in May, the Oral Criminal Court No. 6 of Morón, headed by judges Alejandro Omar Rodríguez Rey, Cristian Adrián Toto and Mariana Maldonado, decided to acquit all the accused. You may also be interested in: Femicide of Candela Rodríguez: her mother renounced the accusation in the second trialIt should be recalled that months earlier, Carola Labrador, Candela’s mother, decided to renounce the accusation and the lawsuit, pointing out that prosecutors Marcelo Tabolaro and Mario Ferrario “do not care about the discovery of the truth, but about proving their dark hypothesis” that holds the family responsible. Marches calling for justice for Candela Rodríguez.” His inquisitive attitude, his lucubrations, his willingness to cast suspicion on a family torn apart and devastated by pain, have been in this whole process truly scoundrel acts that we have only endured so as not to delay the process of justice and punishment for Candela’s murderers. This degrading action is repeated again in this debate, as in the previous one, where, in the same way as here, the family has been soiled. We cannot forget that the Public Prosecutor’s Office is a single entity regardless of those who represent it today, and in this sense it bears all the blame for an ineffective investigation, which has even gone to the extremes of falsifying evidence behind sinister interests,” he said at the time.

Original source in Spanish