Prison sentences confirmed for Guardia Civil officers who forced car occupants to strip naked

The Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court has confirmed the sentence of one and a half years in prison and six years of disqualification of two Guardia Civil officers who, during an operational control, ordered a complete stripping of three young people, whom they stopped while they were driving. in a vehicle on the AP-6, at the El Espinar toll (Segovia), towards Madrid.

The court has rejected the appeals filed by the two convicts against the ruling of the Provincial Court of Segovia that imposed the prison sentences and disqualification for three crimes against moral integrity, with the mitigating factor of undue delays. A third agent was acquitted.

The events occurred during a selective identification operation of vehicles and people to locate drugs, weapons or stolen objects on said highway on which three boys and a girl were traveling in a vehicle. After ordering them to get out of the car, the agents carried out a superficial body search of each of them. The woman’s search was done later because they had to notify a female agent.

The agents asked them to go to the stairs of one of the islands where the booths and ATMs are located. With the help of one of the convicted officers to act as support, the other officer ordered them to take off their shoes, turn their socks inside out, and pull down their pants and underpants. After the latter was refused, he threatened one of them with arrest if he did not do so. He also ordered another of the young men to lift his genitals.

According to the proven facts, this way of being searched, without sufficient reason and expressly contravening the action protocols, of which they were aware, “caused objective humiliation in the three people subjected to said practices, which translated into feelings of shame and humiliation in those subjected to that practice.” All these events were witnessed from the top of the stairs by the agent who was covering the actions of his partner and “despite this he did nothing to prevent it.”

The Chamber concludes that “it is not a failure to comply with Instruction No. 19/2005 of September 13 of the Secretary of State for Security, relating to the practice of personal search procedures by the Security Forces and Bodies by Instruction No. 1/2024 of the Secretary of State for Security, which approves the “comprehensive procedure of police detention”, but which maintains its content and essential guidelines), which meets the typical conduct; but rather it is the absolute gratuitousness of the practice carried out (as the appealed sentence adequately values ​​in its judgment of subsumption), in turn revealed by said non-compliance; of which authorisation is not requested from any instructor since there were no proceedings; nor to the agent who had operational command, it is practiced on people who were not detained and no record is left of its practice.

It adds that “it is precisely this gratuitousness of the demand for full nudity, which determines the objectification of those searched, the attack on their dignity, the humiliation that determines typical behaviour.”

In this case, the ruling explains, “even if it involves nudity viewed by a person of the same sex, the gratuitousness of its practice, without justification, constitutes a relevant act of humiliation in relation to the protected legal good.”

The Chamber in its ruling, presented by Judge Andrés Palomo, indicates that the “relevance of the humiliation that occurred in the records, although there was no physical contact in the practice of full nudity, since there was no regulatory authorisation for the agents to order it, they acted with abuse of its function; without any plausible justification, since at the time the obligatory written record of it was not left and the proven fact, of obligatory observance, on the grounds of error iuris, affirms this lack of justification, by denying sufficient motivation, which in the foundation, identifies absolutely free of charge.”

As for the officer who watched the events from the top of the stairs and did nothing to prevent them, the court rejects the allegation that he did not commit any crime. “It was enough if he was of superior employment to the other accused agent, for him to order him to stop this strip search; and if he was not, go to the agent who had operational command there, who, according to the proven story, was a third agent,” the Chamber concludes.

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