The Constitutional Court will dictate a second verdict against former Podemos deputy Alberto Rodríguez in its plenary session this week, with the aim of restoring him to protection and overturning the decision of former Congress President Meritxell Batet to expel him from the chamber following the conviction by the Supreme Court to one month and fifteen days in prison. This conviction for kicking a police officer during a demonstration should not have resulted in a prison sentence, according to the Supreme Court's first ruling in the Alberto Rodríguez case. The new resolution will therefore avoid making a direct reproach to Batet, since it assumes that its decision to deprive the Podemos MP of his seat was due solely to the content of the Supreme Court ruling, which referred to the imposition of a Fine should have been limited. , which would have meant that the aforementioned parliamentarian could have remained in Congress.
The fact that there will be a second verdict in the Alberto Rodríguez case is because his departure from Congress gave rise to two very different appeals before the Constitutional Court. In one of them, the Supreme Court's verdict for the attack on a police officer, a kick without consequences, was questioned. On the other hand, the question was asked whether the consequence of the prison sentence of one month and fifteen days provided for in the above-mentioned judgment should mean the loss of his seat. The first thing the Constitutional Court had to decide was the order in which it would decide on the appeals, and it chose to analyze the verdict appeal first, especially since the majority of judges concluded that the decision of the former President of Congress to withdraw Rodríguez The Removal of his seat should be understood as a direct consequence of a prison sentence unjustly imposed on the former MP – with the result that a disqualification penalty will be imposed in parallel.
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After putting these basic ideas in order, the Constitutional Court agreed on the 16th to grant Rodríguez protection from conviction by the Supreme Court. The court argues that, strictly speaking, there are no prison sentences of less than three months, as these must be converted into a fine. The Bail Authority therefore decided to partially overturn the Supreme Court's verdict, considering that its verdict should have focused on imposing a fine and not even mentioned the prison sentence in the verdict. In short, the Constitutional Court's thesis is that the Supreme Court should not have postponed this commutation of the judgment until the execution phase of its judgment, but should have done so at the time of promulgation of its decision.
With the second ruling of the Constitutional Court – related to Rodríguez's appeal against his expulsion from Congress by Batet – the Guarantee Authority will decide whether this deputy was properly expelled from the Cortes. And the majority criterion of the court is that the decision to deprive him of his seat violates the political participation rights of Alberto Rodríguez and his constituents, who are no longer represented by him, without any justification. In the majority's decision, the fact that the deputy's resignation came after an opinion from the legal services of the Congress which considered that, even in these circumstances, there were insufficient grounds to deprive him of his seat, had a bearing certain meaning. that the Supreme Court ruling provided for a prison sentence and was not limited to a fine.
The four judges from the conservative sector, in turn, have already expressed their rejection of the first sentence, which they are expected to stick to in this case. His thesis was that it was the first time that the Constitutional Court “changes the sentence that must be imposed on a convicted person, since the sentence imposed is a fine and not a prison sentence”.
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