Slow Spanish justice finally catches up with the 2013 high-speed train crash in Galicia
It has taken more than twice the jail time being sought for the two defendants to prepare the trial. One witness has died in the meantime.
Nine years. The accident was nine years ago. The train derailed 3,361 days ago and now, today, the trial has begun. The surviving victims, the relatives and the train driver, now one of two defendants, have spent 480 weeks suffering, worrying, wondering what Justice would say and they have finally set up an enormous “macro” trial for them at the City of Culture in Santiago de Compostela (Galicia) which, if I remember rightly, you can see a bit from the curve in the track in Angrois where 80 people died in a few instants 110 months ago.
The trial will last for nine months and is split into a criminal part, to determine the guilt of the train driver, Francisco Garzón Amo, and the former head of track safety at Spanish rail operator Adif, Andrés Cortabitarte, and a civil part, to determine compensation. Up to €57 million is being sought. The verdicts might be out, if the victims and defendants are lucky, by the 10th anniversary of the accident, next year. Another year of worrying and wondering.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office is only seeking four year jail sentences for the two defendants, for 80 counts of reckeless manslaughter and 145 counts of reckless injury. If we add two years on to the wait for the appeals and for the case to wind its way up to the Supreme Court, which it surely must do with so many lawyers involved and with such a media-friendly mega trial, that will be twelve years they will have been waiting to find out if they will lose another four in jail. That’s four or twelve years more than the dead have had, four or twelve years of hugs and smiles the relatives haven’t had.
The Regional High Court in Galicia counts 110 barristers and 47 solicitors “grouped” in 154 prosecutions to represent 446 people at the trial. There are so many lawyers that they have put them in groups, with numbers, and this morning they were talking to the judge and joining in the objections on this first day of initial procedural business by calling out their number, as if they were in the meat line at the supermarket. “I can’t see you, counsel”, said the judge on a number of occasions, “Who is speaking?”. “Here at the back, your honour”, replied one or another.
A large number of them shouted out this morning to join in the attempt to stop the trial being broadcast live. For public justice not to be transparent, for citizens not to be able to see it because infringed the rights of one or other of the accused or the accusers, or even all of them together. Fortunately this time, the judge, María Elena Fernández Currás, in charge of this enormous legal logistics operation, rejected the lawyers scheme. Whoever wishes to do so may watch the trial sessions and see what more than 500 witnesses and 100 experts have to say on the matter over the next 36 weeks.
Several lawyers began their arguments before the court with references to documents from 2013 or 2014. “Did the forensic examiner die?”, the judge asked one lawyer who was attempting to reorganise the testimony of that doctor in some way. He did not. A witness, Alejandro García Pérez, did die though, while waiting so many years for this trial. His testimony will not be heard.