Seven women and two men make up the popular jury that from this Monday and for five weeks will judge Jorge Ignacio Palma, accused of murdering the young Marta Calvo -whose body has not yet appeared-, Arliene Ramos and Lady Marcela Vargas, in addition to abusing eight more women.
These nine anonymous citizens will have to determine whether the defendant acted for fifteen months -between the summer of 2018 and November 7, 2019- as a sexual predator by introducing cocaine into the genitals of his victims, in three cases, even lethal by its high purity. The City of Justice has presented from early in the morning the atmosphere of the most mediatic trials.
After the composition of the court, which has lasted for around two and a half hours, the parties’ briefs have been read.
The prosecutor Socorro Zaragozá has already advanced that she will ask the jury for a guilty verdict before a man who, in her opinion, took advantage of the vulnerability of prostituted women to subject them to their sexual practices: “He found the perfect hunting pieces.” “He is not sorry” because “we are here thanks to a courageous mother, who knows where her daughter has disappeared”, “fights before the Civil Guard” and “appears, not once but twice, and calls” the address of the Valencian town Manuel’s from where his daughter had sent him her location. Palma opened the door to Marisol Burón and denied that he knew her daughter. Then she “disappeared.” “As a result of his photograph appearing in the press, the victims also appeared,” he recalled. Otherwise, she considers her, he would have continued to kill.
The accused “had in his possession a cocaine with a purity that is not found in the normal drug market” and only “the big mafias” have, the prosecutor pointed out when recalling Palma’s drug trafficking record. In addition, Zaragozá has highlighted the “coldness” of the accused when he recounted the dismemberment of Marta Calvo in “a tailored confession” in which “the only thing that worries him is that they do nothing to him in prison, that’s why he was in Nursing at the beginning ».
The spokeswoman for the Public Ministry has assured that it will prove “the authorship of the accused both for what has been found, and what has not.” “Forget about American movies,” he challenged the members of the jury, “prosecutors are not the bad guys, we act when a crime is committed” impartially and objectively. Her job, she has said, is “to ensure the protection of the personal privacy of the victims”, who are “the protagonists” of the process. For this reason, she has asked the jury for “common sense” and “responsibility” in the work that has been entrusted to them.
The lawyer for the family of Arliene Ramos and Lady Marcela, as well as six other victims, Juan Carlos Navarro, has endorsed the prosecutor’s account and has stressed that it is “femicide”: violence against women by the “whim” and the “game” of a man. “We are going to hear the defendant, but not two of the victims,” he lamented.
Along the same lines, the lawyer of Marta Calvo’s mother, Pilar Jové, has shown the jury the photos of the last birthday that the 25-year-old celebrated before she disappeared. “Her 92-year-old grandmother still wonders why she is still alive and her granddaughter is dead,” she recounted. “He does not rest in peace because he is in a place that only this person knows -in reference to Palma- and he has refused to say”, he stressed, while indicating that “the worst punishment of losing a child is not being able to bury him.”
In addition, Jové has focused on the fact that “the dismemberment version does not hold.” “Absolutely nothing was found in the landfills,” he detailed, recalling that the accused maintained that he had thrown the young woman’s remains into several containers in the area. Palma has “a homicidal profile”, according to the lawyer: “He may be a psychopath, but at no time is he incapable of distinguishing what is right and what is wrong.”
For her part, the lawyer of another of the victims who “had the misfortune to cross paths” with Palma -as one of the lawyers has defined- has recalled that the case of Arliene Ramos was filed when she believed that she had died of an overdose: “It is easy to think that who is going to look for them”, due to their condition as prostitutes. “None of them carried the drug” and he played with them “as if it were Russian roulette,” she added. “They did not expect what he said were ‘white parties'”, she clarified, in the same way, the lawyer of Sergio Calvo, Marta’s father.
The defendant’s defense has asserted that his client “has not killed anyone, nor has he intended to kill”, as well as that “he has not sexually abused anyone”, since “they all voluntarily agreed to have sex with a white party”. They will prove it, he has advanced, with “two tools”: the law and the truth. The jurist has appealed to the presumption of innocence and has asked the jury to be “fair” both with the victims and with her sponsor.
“Everything that Jorge Ignacio Palma is being accused of is due to pressure,” he stated, since “there is no evidence to prove guilt.” In that sense, he has stressed that his representative learned of the death of Arlene and Lady Marcela while already in prison. The lawyer María Herrera has acknowledged that Palma was sentenced to three years and four months in prison for a crime against public health because 200 grams of cocaine were seized from him, but she has clarified that her client “did not have a single gram” when they occurred. the facts that are judged now. At the same time, and although he “understands” the feelings of Marta Calvo’s mother, he “never denied” the whereabouts of the young woman. In her opinion, what has happened in all this time is that “it is not easy to find bodies in a landfill.”
The 40-year-old defendant has been in provisional prison since he turned himself in at a Civil Guard barracks in December 2019 and confessed to having dismembered the young woman from Estivella after having died while having sex with drugs. What happened with Marta Calvo uncovered a trail of similar cases allegedly committed by the same man with a similar method. The Prosecutor’s Office requests 130 years in prison for Palma, while the accusations ask that the reviewable permanent prison be applied to him. For its part, the defense of the accused asks for free acquittal.
The trial takes place in the Tirant I Chamber of the City of Justice of Valencia, the largest in the complex and the one reserved for macro-causes. In fact, the judge has decided to divide the oral hearing into eleven parts, with a chronological exposition of the facts by witnesses and experts, to facilitate their understanding by the members of the jury, who will deliberate from July 13, according to the initial calendar.
