Source: Blog Expediente
Author: Itzel Loranca
June 1, 2017
Translation: Jorge B. (Original publication in Spanish on February 11, 2017)
General State Attorney’s Violations Arrive at The Supreme Court
- • The Federal Judicial Power marked as invalid the verdicts against Yarold Christian Leyte Quintanar, the person accused of the assassination of Maria Teresa Gonzalez in 2012.
• This case reached the Supreme Court.
• The investigation that appoints him as “The Valle Alto murderer” is plagued with irregularities and tortures.
A new verdict by Mexico’s National Supreme Court (SCJN) would restore Yarold Christian Leyte Quintanar his name and his liberty, and to rid out the nickname of “The Valle Alto murderer”.
Since 2012, his lawyer has denounced irregularities during the investigation of the assassination of Maria Teresa González González. Yarold pleaded guilty after being tortured by agents of the extinct Bureau of Investigations of the state of Veracruz (AVI).
The Supreme Court has in its hands now the decision to validate or not, the sentence of 32 years and six months of imprisonment.
This will be his last resource, his last chance to regain his liberty. The other possibility will be to remain in his cell in the Tuxpan Jail, where he has abided the last five years; under an investigation full of aberrations.
“The Valle Alto Murderer”
First, the AVI kidnapped Yarold, and put him inside a small room. There, he suffered a terrible torture that included electric shocks in the scrotum, knocking in the face, and frequent threatening using a gun pointing his head and face… but he was not intimidated. He continued declaring his innocence.
Everything changed when AVI agents brought Yarold´s wife to the same building. She ignored the nightmare Yarold was experiencing and accepted to meet him. Her two accompanying children were abandoned by the agents with a local woman passing by.
Yarold never saw how his wife was beaten, but could listen to her cries of pain while she was violated by the cops. He then, decided to renounce to his liberty, in behalf of the security of his family.
Early in the morning of March 14th, 2012, He was presented to the media as the confessed murderer of Maria Teresa Gonzalez Gonzalez. The local press nicknamed him “the Valle Alto Murderer”. And reproduce in their pages the official version of the crime in which the young lady lost her life.
According to the investigation conducted by the Public Ministry, the official version is that Yarold had a debt with a bank named “Compartamos Banco”. Maria worked for this bank and that day she went to collect the money from Yarold, but he refused to pay. The mismatch ended in a fight inside Yarold´s house.
A piece of broken glass, from a shattered glass table was used by Yarold to kill Teresa. That same night, he decided to drag the corpse outside, to the abandoned house in front.
That was the tale related by “The Valle Alto Murderer”.
Notwithstanding his pleas for lesions, The Istanbul Protocol was not applied. He accused the AVI agents for torture, but the Public Ministry never conducted the corresponding investigation. This is against the Federal Mexican Law to Prevent and Sanction Acts of Torture, in its article 11. It is stated that every Public servant is obligated to denounce and investigate any possible act of torture.
Inconsistencies
The telephone number owned by Yarold continues functioning.
The AVI lied, declaring that in the day Yarold was captured, he was taken in possession of three cell phones (the assumed victim´s, his own and a third phone). But he was presented to the Public Ministry only with one cell phone that they said, was Maria´s phone.
Guadalupe Salmones Gabriel, Yarold´s advocate punctuates that after four years, the cell phone of the incarcerated and condemned person is still in use. “You can dial that number and one person will answer you” she says, among many other inconsistencies.
He asserts that the time that Leyte Quintanar was declaring is identical to that recorded in the reconstruction of the facts, implying that he was in two different places at the same time.
The prosecutor failed to prove the link between the murdered girl and the alleged murderer. Even staff at the bank she worked on acknowledged that Yarold never had a debt there.
The official investigation also states that Yarold made payments with the victim’s bank cards, and made phone calls from her telephone; however, there are no records of such activities in bank statements or in the record of calls and messages of Maria’s cell phone.
The lawyer underlines another anomaly, noting that this irregularity was detected by the own experts of the General State Attorney:
The agents found that there is no relationship between Yarold´s house (where Maria was supposed murdered), and the house where she was found. They point out that the evidence reveals that it is in the abandoned house itself, where the body was discovered, that the crime was committed. Not elsewhere.
Sentence
Yarold lived in Veracruz from 2006 to 2012. He arrived with his wife and son to this coastal city, where his second child was born. A credit from his work allowed him to own a house, in the Flamingos Street in the Valle Alto Neighborhood.
On March 2nd, 2012, the body of Maria Teresa González González, (reported missing on February 28th, 2012 by her relatives), was found dead in the abandoned house opposite Yarold´s. Maria Teresa worked for “Compartamos banco” a microcredit bank. She was last seen in the Valle Alto neighborhood while she was collecting money at different houses.
By 2013 Yarold Christian was already in the Tuxpan prison as the alleged murderer of Maria Teresa, and his case in the hands of the First Judge of First Instance. On January 29th, 2016, he was given a sentence of 32 years, six months, payment of damages and a fine of 250 days of minimum wage in Mexico.
A legal labyrinth
The defense appeal the sentence before the Seventh Chamber of the Superior Court of Justice of the State, based in Jalapa. But on May 12th, 2016, the state court upheld the decision made by the Tuxpan judge.
At that time, Yarold requested the protection of the Federal Judicial Power (PJF).
The resolution in its favor arrived on December 8th, 2016. The legal protection number 316/2016, granted by the First Collegiate Court in Criminal Matters, mandated that the Public Ministry must present its conclusions before the judge in a period of no more than 10 days, But the commissioned prosecutor failed to do so on the prescribed time.
For the PJF, this meant that the Public prosecutor had given up his faculty to charge Yarold, and therefore, they suppressed the criminal action against Yarold. In addition, the judges affirm, the due process of the accused was violated. In similar cases, the SCJN has dictated the immediate release of the accused one.
The magistrates of the First Collegiate Court ordered the Seventh Chamber of the State Court to declare the verdict of the Judge of First Instance unsupported, and also to investigate Yarold’s pleas of torture during several years.
The PJF decision was not welcomed by the Sixteenth Assistant Prosecutor of the State Attorney General’s Office (FGE) of Veracruz, and on December 26th he appealed the resolution to the SCJN.
Upon hearing this, Yarold’s defense filed a petition to the National Supreme Court of Justice requesting confirmation of the Protection granted by the PJF.
“Nothing but justice”
Rosalinda Quintanar, Yarold´s mother has said: “We want the truth of this case to be revealed, not only for my son´s sake, but also for the girl´s. Because there will be no justice, while they have an innocent one imprisoned”
Her voice and her face correspond to those of a woman who has been carrying an unspeakable despair for years.
Since March 14th, 2012, when she answered a call, it was his daughter-in-law, who was calling from a public telephone in the city of Veracruz, and told her that Yarold had been arrested.
She traveled from Mexico City, where she resides, to the city of Veracruz. There, she was not allowed to see him until a month later, and only after she complained before the State Commission on Human Rights
“I can visit him twice a year. There has always been threatening that they will kill him, that he will commit suicide, they always tell me that he is going to commit suicide, but I don´t believe it, he is not going to commit suicide. He has all our support; we have spoken honestly of the situation. He has tried to prove his innocence. “
Now that his case has arrived before the SCJN, Rosalinda asks “nothing more than justice, nothing but the truth”.
“This has caused us a lot of pain, and I suppose Teresa´s family, too, because the police had not investigated the situation as it should be. By having tortured my son they did not make him a guilty but a Victim of this situation, for five years now. “
