The Court of Appeals of Chillán sentenced the Municipality of Quirihue to pay compensation of $4,000,000 for moral damage, after establishing the lack of service by not registering the license of a driver who was detained in a vehicle checkpoint, after verifying that His license was not registered in the Civil Registry and Identification Service, despite having passed all the exams in the municipality’s Traffic Department.
In a unanimous ruling, the First Chamber of the appeal court – made up of ministers Érica Pezoa, Antonella Farfarello and the judicial prosecutor Gabriel Hernández – confirmed the contested resolution, issued by the Court of First Instance of Quirihue, which accepted the claim.
The ratified first instance ruling concluded that “(…) the Municipality of Quirihue effectively incurred a lack of service by not having complied with the entire process regarding obtaining the actor’s driver’s license, in particular by having omitted the sending to the national registry of drivers of motor vehicles, therefore not appearing in the registry indicated as validly obtained, which led the Carabineros personnel to presume, also due to the form of seals on the license, that the license carried by the actor on January 18, 2020, was falsified, thereby initiating a criminal investigation carried out by the Cauquenes Prosecutor’s Office, which began with the detention of the plaintiff for a few hours, seizing the driver’s license from the beginning of the procedure, and ending the “The same by the local prosecutor’s office of Quirihue through the approval by this court of the decision not to initiate an investigation, dated June 24, 2020.”
