Supreme Court confirms 24 years prison for murder for a man who burned his partner alive

The Supreme Court (TS) has confirmed the 24-year prison sentence for a man who murdered his partner in San Cristóbal de La Laguna (Santa Cruz de Tenerife), whom he put in a bathtub and doused with petrol before setting her on fire.

The Criminal Chamber confirms that the man committed the crime of murder with the aggravating circumstances of treachery, cruelty, kinship, and gender contempt.

The murder took place in September 2020 in the home they shared. The Provincial Court of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, where the trial took place, convicted the man and also ordered him to compensate each of the deceased’s daughters with 75,000 euro. The convicted person appealed to the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands, which rejected his allegations and maintained the same sentence.

According to the proven facts, the man committed the crime “consciously” and without the victim – 50 years old – being able to oppose him, since he prevented her from any defence and by deciding to set her on fire, he knew that it caused him “terrible suffering”, deliberately and unnecessarily increasing both physical and mental suffering.

The victim, who suffered second and third degree burns to 85% of her body and internal injuries from smoke inhalation and heat, died the next day in the hospital.

After being convicted and his sentence ratified by the Canary Islands courts, the man went to the Supreme Court, where he argued that his presumption of innocence had been violated and that there was an error in the assessment of the evidence.

But the Criminal Chamber, with Judge Manuel Marchena as speaker, points out that there is no argument to support the first complaint, because “the defence is limited to a generic invocation of the material content of that constitutional right, without projecting the body of doctrine that defines it towards the factual assumption that has been the subject of prosecution”.

And, likewise, the TS rejects that there is an error in the assessment of the evidence, once examining the images of the scene of the murder, the small dimensions of the bathtub, the corpulence of the accused, the “defensive limitations” of the victim, the “prolongation of her suffering” and the “permanent humiliation” to which she was subjected.

“The judgment of authorship is built on legally obtained evidentiary material, of an unequivocal incriminating meaning and rationally valued,” the magistrates state.

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