The Public Prosecutor, in its final conclusions in the trial against J.E.M., who has admitted during the process that he killed his partner in Tarancón in 2022, has accepted the mitigating factor of confession, and reduced the requested sentence for the murder charge from 25 to 23 years and 9 months, to which the three years requested for three counts of assault must be added. The private, popular, and regional government prosecutions have adhered to the Public Prosecutor’s proposal.
The jury will have to assess issues such as whether there was treachery, that is, if the victim was able to defend herself, and cruelty, if the accused caused unnecessary suffering to the victim. These points will determine whether it is a murder, as argued by the Prosecutor, or a homicide.
They will also have to determine other issues such as the acknowledgment of the facts and the aggravating factors of gender and kinship.
During the conclusions, the lawyer for the private prosecution has lamented that these events «should never have happened,» as the victim entered the VioGén system for monitoring cases of gender-based violence and had a protection order that became inactive after the husband was acquitted of a domestic violence charge when his wife refused to testify against him.
On the other hand, the defense has emphasized J.E.M.’s cooperative attitude «from the very beginning» and that he has adopted «a spontaneous and truthful confession behavior, aiding the investigation by pointing out where the weapon was located.»
The lawyer referred to the statements of one of the children, who claimed to have seen both parents with a knife and alleged that the accused showed signs of previous injuries. Despite that, she reiterated that he has always maintained a stance of acknowledging the facts rather than a defense-based approach.
In this last session, the accused J.E.M. asked for forgiveness «for my children, my wife, and her family» when he exercised his right to speak at the trial, which started late due to issues with transferring the prisoner from Estremera prison.
During the day, the neighbor of the couple, who maintained a friendship with the victim, testified. She had recounted episodes of abuse to her and stated that she heard knocking at the door that morning. «But I was overcome by sleep,» she said, and did not get up to open it.
Instead, what woke her was «complete silence,» which prompted her to look through the peephole, from where she saw the accused. When she tried to open the door, the victim’s husband knocked twice to prevent her before leaving.
Psychologists who dealt with the psychological impact on the couple’s two older children—aged five and six at the time of the events—also testified. They heard the screams from their room during the incident and then saw their mother on the couch, already deceased. One of them even touched the body.
In their testimony, they confirmed that the children have «full awareness» of what happened and described the episodes of re-experiencing, «intrusive memories of the event» they have lived through. The psychologists noted dissociative symptoms in the younger daughter, as she «told the psychologist that her mom was coming tonight to give her a present.»