The Court of Seville has suspended the sentence of five months in prison for a crime of disobedience for which María Salmerón was convicted on December 18, 2019. This is the last sanction that this 59-year-old woman had pending, who two years ago had She had to go to prison for refusing to comply with her daughter's visitation regime with her ex-husband, convicted of mistreating her while they were married, the same reason for which her last sentence was handed down. “It has been two decades to be able to breathe easy again,” Salmerón explains to this newspaper in a sentence that summarizes the relief he feels after the judicial ordeal that he has suffered all this time alone, as he has always repeated, to fulfill the wish of his daughter.
The order draws attention to the fact that all the criminal acts that he accumulates date back to October 2014 and that “the family situation that gave rise to the facts prosecuted here also ceased years ago, when his daughter came of age, eliminating the risk of criminal repetition.” The judges emphasize that since then “there is no evidence that she has committed new crimes.” For all this and because Salmerón has not committed a crime in the last nine years, the court considers “in the opinion of the trial magistrate, that we cannot rigorously affirm an unfavorable prognosis of crime and nothing prevents the granting of the extraordinary benefit,” related to the suspension of the sentence. The measure is conditional on him not committing a crime in the next five months.
Since she separated from her daughter's father in 2000 to end the physical abuse he inflicted on her, the strategy of Salmerón's ex-husband, led by the Association for Victims of the Gender Violence Law, focused on filing different complaints each time She did not comply with the visitation regime, induced by the terror that her own daughter expressed every time she had to leave her at the meeting point, and which she herself recounted in an interview with this newspaper. In 2008, the Supreme Court sentenced her ex-partner to 21 months in prison for mistreating her, but her lack of criminal record and the reduced sentence kept him from going to jail.
Something that, however, Salmerón could not avoid, who on June 9, 2022 entered the Alcalá de Guadaíra penitentiary center (Seville) to serve his nine-month prison sentence for disobedience to authority, after failing to His fourth request for clemency was successful. Six months later she was able to be released on parole and although she was happy with her, her happiness was not full, because she had the shadow of this last sentence. “I'm not sure if they have something else prepared for me,” she said then, with a hint of anguish in her voice.
Today that anguish has become a joy that carries with it a lot of fatigue accumulated after so many years of fighting, first against her ex-husband and then against the judicial system. In these 24 years he has faced six sentences, three of them pardoned, one commuted to a fine, the latter suspended and the one that he could not evade and which has left a trace of rage in his heart. “An injustice,” as he always defined that decision, which today he feels has been partially repaired.
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