Luis Chocobar with his lawyer Fernando Soto (File photo: Nicolás Stulberg)
Chamber II of the National Court of Cassation in Criminal and Correctional Matters of the Federal Capital, made up of judges Horacio Días and Eugenio Sarrabayrouse, revoked the sentence that the police officer Luis Chocobar had received in 2021 for his intervention in an event that occurred in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of La Boca, where he killed a minor criminal. The magistrates ordered a new court to be held to hold another oral trial.
It was a Juvenile Court that convicted Chocobar as the author of the crime of aggravated homicide in excess of the performance of duty. The penalty was two years in prison and five years of disqualification from holding public office. That was the sentence that was annulled this Monday.
Cassation annulled Chocobar’s sentence because the arguments of the judges of the Oral Juvenile Court No. 2, Jorge Ariel Apolo, Fernando Pisano and Adolfo Calvete, were self-contradictory regarding Chocobar’s conduct. “Obvious and serious inconsistencies and internal contradictions emerge in each of the votes; and also external, since as the defense states in its appeal, the three votes affirm different circumstances regarding core aspects of the fact attributed to Chocobar,” the judges of room II stated in the resolution to which Infobae agreed.
The event occurred on the morning of December 8, 2017, when Juan Pablo Kukoc and another minor -JMPR- tried to steal the camera from American tourist Frank Joseph Wolek in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of La Boca while he was photographing the murals on Garibaldi Street. , between Suárez and Olavarría streets.
Wolek resisted the robbery and was stabbed: he was badly injured. Then, the Chocobar police officer went out to chase the criminal and, in that context, shot and killed him.
Chocobar and Wolek
In the oral trial, Chocobar was convicted of being the author of the crime of aggravated homicide in excess of the performance of duty and JMPR received the sentence of nine years in prison for the crime of attempted homicide criminis causa and robbery against Wolek.
The case had generated a great public commotion and the then Minister of Security during the PRO government, Patricia Bullrich, publicly supported Chocobar. The police officer even paid a visit to the Casa Rosada where he met with the then president Mauricio Macri.
But after the conviction, the defense led by lawyer Fernando Soto appealed the ruling. And last March he appeared at a hearing to request the revocation. He told judges that he “would not have wanted” Kukoc, whom he shot as he fled after assaulting an American tourist, to die.
The complaint insisted that a conviction for doubly aggravated murder be required because it was committed when Kukoc was fleeing and did not represent a danger, and because it was committed by a member of a security force.
The Court of Cassation confirmed this Tuesday the nine-year prison sentence for JMPR, since the judges rejected all his appeals. But the court did accept the appeal of the police officer’s defense. The magistrates understood that the votes of the oral court judges were contradictory among themselves regarding Chocobar’s conduct and that, therefore, there was no majority of grounds to sustain the ruling.
Cassación pointed out that each of the three judges of the oral court explained in their foundations different circumstances about Chocobar’s conduct when firing the shots when he pursued Kukoc.
Luis Chocobar with the then president Mauricio Macri on his visit to Casa Rosada
“There is no way to reconcile a first version, according to which six of a total of seven shots were fired for an attempted attack and a final one to stop the aggressor from fleeing; a second version that presents four shots aimed at stopping the escape, preceded by another three in the air, intimidating; and a third that contemplates three shots in the air, intimidating, and another four carried out wrongly interpreting an imminent attack,” Casación summarized the three positions of the fundamentals.
The magistrates added that “the self-contradictions and deficits in the reasoning of the three judges prevent us from knowing what Chocobar represented specifically in relation to the homicide; whether there was a serious prosecution of the risk he introduced; or if he minimized it, to such an extent that a malicious accusation could not be formulated.”
“The evidenced review shows us that, starting from a problem of lack of a substantial majority of foundations, we come to the conclusion that it is also unknown what the criteria of each of the judges is regarding the subjective imputation of the result, because the “Zigzags” and “oscillations” obstruct our work,” the Cassation magistrates concluded.
The court also highlighted “the absence of the most basic clarity in the reasoning of the sentence” and a “deficit of logical motivation in the judicial sentence.”
Thus, Cassation annulled the ruling regarding Chocobar, removed the Oral Court for Minors No. 2 and ordered that a new court be drawn to hold another oral trial.
