The attorney Elena Maria Fernandez, who led the prosecution against Ana Julia Quezada, who was sentenced last September to a permanent prison revisable by the murder of the child, Gabriel Cross, has presented to the courts of Almeria a complaint against an official of the penitentiary centre of El Acebuche for the alleged leak to the media data of the life in prison Quezada. According to legal sources, the public ministry considers that the information provided by the public employee was a double victimization of the parents of the small and sees, therefore, evidence of an offence in the performance of the worker’s prison.
In the summer, another prosecutor provincial, in this case from Valencia, already reported a similar event. In that case, the research focused on two workers of the prisons of Castellón and Valencia, which allegedly spread through a television programs data of Mary Gombau, accused of killing her two children of five years and six months in march in Godella (Valencia). In both cases, the prosecution considers that the public employees could incur a crime of revelation of secrets, punished by a fine and up to three years of disqualification, and in more serious cases, with between one and three years in prison. Until now it was not usual to prosecute judicially this type of actions.
Research Prison
In the two cases, the public Prosecutor began its investigations at the request of the General Secretariat of Penitentiary Institutions, that considers that these alleged leaks not only offend against the fundamental right to privacy of the inmates, but also do serious harm to the victims. Its head, Angel Luis Ortiz, submitted in September, coinciding with the start of the trial against Quezada, a letter to the directors of prisons to remind officials of their duty “to maintain professional secrecy regarding the data, news or information that you know,” for his work, as reflected in the Code of professional Ethics of Penitentiary Institutions.
In the letter, Ortiz referred to it as these leaks of “clear decay of professional ethics” that, in his opinion, damaged in a significant way the reinsertion of the inmates affected: “The internal look at yourself as an object of interest of the media, which definitely distorts the image they have of themselves and decreases the possibilities of addressing the crime”. The writing emphasis was on the damage they caused to the victims of the “social prominence undue to whom personal injury could have caused”.
In the case of Quezada, two media were reproducing the voice distorted, which is presented as a prison official. In those interventions, detailing that the author of the crime of Gabriel is not concerned with other prisoners to avoid an assault. They also spoke about an attempt of self-harm. Prisons identified to the course worker and referred the information to the office of the Prosecutor. This opened up a few proceedings of research that led to the end of November in a complaint to the courts of Almeria to consider that there is evidence of a crime.
Similar was the process in the case of the alleged parricida film festival. Prisons investigated two prison officers who revealed on television program that the inmate had “a kind of delirium, without diagnosis and without medication”, that he had suffered a “psychotic break” and that it had received “kicks and bites” to other officials. Then, the Prosecutor’s office of Valencia also considered that the public employees had revealed data related to the health of the inmate that “due to the importance and the damage they can cause to the privacy of the person are considered protected information”, so reported the facts to the district court.
