A Criminal Court in Palma has acquitted the lawyer accused of setting up a scheme of fake marriages for Brazilian transsexuals in the Sineu peace court. The lawyer was the only one of the twelve defendants who initially sat in the dock against whom the Prosecutor’s Office maintained the charges after the trial.
In accordance with the accusation of the Public Ministry, the lawyer had charged around 1,500 euros from people without papers in exchange for arranging marriage with European citizens in order to obtain legal residence in Spain. However, the ruling rules out that there is evidence that marriages of convenience were arranged and assesses that the lawyer’s actions may have been limited to processing papers for real couples and charging for legal advice so that the marriages could come to fruition.
At the trial, the lawyer justified that acted “out of sensitivity towards the LGTBI community” and because she knew several of the transsexuals who asked her for professional advice. He also justified that, as a result of these efforts, several groups at the national level tried to have him represent them, something that he rejected because his main professional activity is linked to another area of Law. The ruling discards the existence of evidence. In large part because the two initial complainants, who managed a hostess apartment under the jurisdiction of the accused, almost completely disengaged. These two witnesses had been the ones who reported the alleged fake marriage plot to the National Police. However, in the trial what they talked about was marriages between couples that had been consolidated for years before the signing of the documents.
The defenses stated at the hearing that the complaint was an attack with the objective of discrediting the competition. At the end of the trial, the prosecutor dropped the charges against most of the defendants. lacking evidence to maintain that any payment had been made to carry out the marriages. All of the accused indicated that even years after the wedding, cohabitation between the couples was still in force. The last pending leg, the lawyer, is left out in the sentence. The Prosecutor’s Office demanded a sentence of one year in prison for him, far from the eight years that appeared in the provisional classification.
2024-02-25 23:29:53
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