After spending only 14 months in prison and years of nightmare, former soccer player Dani Alves was acquitted this Friday by the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) of the four and a half years in prison sentence imposed by the Barcelona Court of Appeals (northeastern Spain) for allegedly raping a young woman in a nightclub in Barcelona in December 2022.
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The case, which captured the world’s attention since it happened, had a last development a year ago, when the Barcelona Court agreed to release the former Barcelona player on bail, who paid one million euros, as it was considered that he had “diminished” the risk of flight.
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Why was Dani Alves acquitted of his sexual offense conviction?
The civil and criminal chamber of the TSJC, composed of three women and one man, concludes, unanimously, that the testimony of the young woman who accused the former Brazilian footballer in December 2022 is not sufficient to uphold the accused’s conviction, and in this case, the right to the presumption of innocence prevails. The judges point out that not establishing the accusatory hypothesis as proven does not mean stating “that the true hypothesis is the one maintained by the accused’s defense.”
In January 2023, Alves appeared before the court and gave three different versions of the events, with contradictions, and the substitute judge of the Investigation Court 15 (Anna Marín) sent him to prison without bail, a measure requested by the Prosecutor’s Office and the private prosecution.
The victim’s lawyers, Esther García and David Sáez, stated: “The sentence dismantles the reasoning of the first instance judgment. The function of a Superior Court of Justice is to review the evidence, but not to make a new assessment of the evidence. It indicates that the arguments of the judgment are discredited and directly accepts the defense’s appeal and acquits the accused," García expressed to the media.
In addition, the lawyer has explained that her client feels “very disappointed and very sad” with the decision, to the point that “she felt like she was back in the bathroom where the events occurred”: “To what extent does a victim of sexual violence have to explain in detail such traumatic events? We are going to appeal the sentence, but we will take into account that our client can withstand the time given the traumatic way in which the decision was made today," she added.
In the same intervention, Sáez has pointed out the surprise with which they have received the decision to acquit Alves, especially for the reasons behind it: “It proposes a concept of credibility and reliability far removed from what jurisprudential doctrine has recently done. That new concept of reliability is very strange when objective credibility is part of the evaluation of any sentence, and it does so by referring to blurry and distant images of a nightclub when they are not part of the punishable act.”
“Evaluating what the victim was doing before the assault or not is not part of the debate. We are surprised that the victim’s credibility is linked to those images and to what is understood as a poor explanation of the facts in the lower court’s ruling. The client can only stick to a firm account, which she has always maintained, and her statements should be taken into consideration, not the interpretations that come from the initial ruling,” the statement concluded.