Ignacio Camacho: Time of Law

The verdict will be a difficult and controversial verdict, likely subject to a public vote, and whatever the meaning of the verdict may be, making it easier to question from the political sphere. This is because, although this lawsuit is being developed with guaranteed procedural precision and strict legal rigor, the following points cannot be denied. … Politics had been with her from the beginning. Politics was the original leak, politics was the debate it sparked, politics was government intervention, politics was the defendant’s reluctance to resign, politics was communication noise. Politically, despite his position as a high-ranking judicial official, he is in the position of being the protagonist of the trial. Attorney General of Sanchismo. A person whom the president has defended as if he were one of his cabinet members.

So no matter what happens, there will be controversy. If the court acquits him, the government will launch a frightening propaganda campaign. And if he is guilty, he will delve into arguments of right-wing inspired persecution. This turmoil will continue regardless of whether there is a conviction, but it is the result of the polarization that dominates the public sphere, pits one half of Spain against the other, shatters the credibility of justice, and threatens to divide the country internally. Outside of this painful civil division, no one and no one is left behind, and its effects affect key institutions in the balance of the system.

We Spaniards have seen prosecutors close to García Ortiz criticize the same judicial police, the UCO, which is cooperating with the investigation of other cases. We could hear jurists and professors pontificating about the biased nature of instruction, and we could read a priori classifications of judges’ ideologies filled with contempt for the independence of their jurisdictions and the professionalism of their work. We learned about the altercation between employees of the public prosecutor’s office through the mouths of officials at the public prosecutor’s office. The prosecutor’s office pointed to Isabel Ayuso as the instigator of the incident. And we pondered how the media would turn the hearing into another spectacle of a partisan circus, with debaters working together in dialectics on both sides.

Judges must separate themselves from all this and honestly deliberate based on the only resources at their disposal: evidence, findings, testimony, assurances, and context. We are aware that there are contradictions between them, that it is difficult to reach a consensus, and that any conclusion will ultimately infer their biases. In fact, they are already suffering from the interference of a magistrate who, while attending the trial in considerable silence, can pre-state the brazen ignorance of a complete legal layman. But if you don’t have enough experience, courage, and knowledge to overcome all of this, you won’t get a seat on the Supreme Court.

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