When the law doesn't measure up

(Madrid, Spain)

There’s a street in Barcelona called Carrer Guillem Tell, William Tell Street. It’s a respectable street in a nice area, Sarrià-Sant Gervasi, but on the night of the 16th of December 2005 it was the scene of a brutal killing.

Three teenagers, two of whom were barely eighteen and the other a mere sixteen years old, found a woman called Rosario Endrinal who was trying to sleep in the small reception area that houses a cash machine. They spent a number of hours taunting her and then beating her, going away and coming back for more sport several times, before they finally poured twenty-five litres of a highly inflammable liquid on her and set her alight. They laughed as the flames went up, and calmly walked out of the bank. Ms Endrinal’s death throes lasted four hours.

The CCTV footage, played out nightly on news programmes during the trial, showed that Ms Endrinal underwent a terrible ordeal and died a horrific death. People were shocked at the images, even in a country where stills and video footage of the dead and dying are the currency of the lunchtime news and the morning papers.

MUMMY’S KNITTED JUMPER

The boys who committed this crime were middle-class kids who lived a comfortable life. During the trial they wore the sort of jerseys ridiculed in Bridget Jones in a sad attempt to underline their homeliness.

I make this distinction not to claim that poverty is an excuse for brutality, nor to suggest that the working class are skangers whom we should expect to behave in this way, but merely to show that these boys have had absolutely no obstacles in their upbringing other than suffering that most crippling of social diseases, being born middle class.

They have not suffered a negation of their culture, the history books are not rewritten against them, their language is not dying due to prolonged occupation and oppression and they are not subject to torture at the hands of a police force whose acts against society have regularly made the home page of Amnesty International. Ms Endrinal certainly hadn’t done anything to them.

NATIONAL SOCIALISM?

On the same day last week that these three individuals were given token prison sentences, the Audiencia Nacional – Spain’s High Court – announced new measures against people convicted of terrorism.

For now we’ll leave aside the debate on what constitutes terrorism, how modern governments use the term to further oppress the people through fear and even what constitutes a crime in the present Orwellian reality.

The measures announced by Spain’s justice system – and rushed through by what we are given to believe is a Socialist government – involve a period of between ten and twenty years of strict rules which will start after the original sentence has finished. These rules include the restrictions of reporting to the sentencing court at pre-arranged times, communicating all movements – including change of address or workplace – to the court, not taking jobs which could put the person in the position of being able to re-offend, and avoiding victims or families of victims at all costs.

However, there are some ominous signs of the power now enjoyed by the justice system on this list of new measures. The convicted person must seek permission from the court if he or she wants to move house. The person may be obliged to wear an electronic ankle bracelet at all times. And the person must undergo whatever physical or psychological medical treatment the court deems necessary on a whim at any time during the ten to twenty years.

All of this takes place after the so-called debt to society has supposedly been repaid.

Again, this is the work of a Socialist government in an overwhelmingly Socialist country.

THE SCALES OF JUSTICE

The two oldest boys of the three who murdered Ms Endrinal during what they saw as no more than a night of alcohol-fuelled rowdiness were each sentenced to seventeen years in prison. The third boy – only sixteen at the time of the crime, but considered by the court to be the principal author of the crime – had already been sentenced to eight years in youth custody with five extra years of parole.

The sentences were considered severe because the judge believed that beyond any reasonable doubt it had been demonstrated that the three had acted with what the English justice system has always called malice aforethought. If counsel had been able to sow the seeds of doubt around the night’s entertainment, the sentences would have been even lower.

Around three weeks before the sentencing hearing, the leading Catalan newspaper, La Vanguardia, had announced with the self-important frowning glee of the red-top that the boys could face 56 years of prison.

However, as is so often the case, they will serve only a few years before being allowed to carry on as if nothing had ever happened.

BELONGING

On the other hand, according to the High Court’s new measures, a person convicted of simply belonging to any organisation that the Spanish – or indeed the American – government classifies as a terrorist group will face the usual twelve years in prison followed by up to twenty years of enforced medical “re-education” and electronic surveillance.

I recognise that it would be difficult to try to compare the three boys with members of a terrorist organisation, or even to try to justify the existence of such groups here. However, the former would be difficult simply because of a lack of context, and the latter would only be impossible because of the mass hysteria attached to the topic.

So I’ll put it another way. The potential 12+20-year sentence simply for belonging to a group would be the equivalent of condemning those three boys to a similar sentence simply for being Catalan, or teenagers, or middle-class, or bored, or for enjoying a drink, or for having wilfully neglectful parents, or whatever you believe to be at the root of their crime.

Therefore this would surely mean that the brutality of the crime itself and the teenagers’ delight at their achievement, having not been taken into consideration within that offence, would have to be punished by many more years of prison, followed by decades of the sort of treatment of which Hitler could only dream.

WHAT ARE OUR PRIORITIES?

As it stands, these three boys have been handed down a sentence of a few years of comfortable, middle-class retirement followed by years of amnesia, for the crime of taunting a woman and then beating her and finally burning her to death.

And as it stands, deciding to join an organisation as a protest against a government or other authority because your people is being silently, but no less brutally, oppressed will carry a much heavier sentence than burning a woman to death in the street.

The Socialist Spanish government should ask itself – what are our priorities now?