"If I grab this woman and kill her, it's homicide."

BarcelonaNight begins to fall. From the cluster of windows in the towers of Vall d'Hebron emanates a white light that contrasts with the deep blue sky and transforms the Montbau neighborhood into a quintessential movie poster scene. BCNegra festivalFlyers in times of crisis, corner bars, cigarette butts lining the sidewalks, shadowy alleyways. Under the empty gaze of a sick man observing the world from his room, I am an ant on my way to the Montbau Library – Albert Pérez Baró, specializing in crime fiction. Judge, popularizer, and author specializing in the genre, Graziella Moreno, will lead a workshop to simulate how a people's trial works, a method with little tradition in our country, barely a decade old. First, a quick stop: she asks the audience if they want the event to be in Spanish or Catalan – the library's inertia leads to Catalan: bullet dodged.

"Movies have done a lot of damage; they have nothing to do with reality because they portray the American penal system, which is the opposite of ours," Moreno warns. "There, they can arrest the president of Venezuela and put him in prison and then see if there's a guilty party. Here, the system prefers the presumption of innocence, and if you're Hispanic or Black, you have it tough," the official explains. Here, only some crimes go to a jury trial, and murder or homicide is one of them. "It's not the same, even though the press doesn't quite grasp the difference"—she repeats this three times, ahem, and continues with the example—"If I grab this woman and kill her, that would be homicide. Murder is a death with circumstances, like cruelty, treachery, planning... And are there only slightly more serious ones? The first one is the one that kills you, right?"

The furor for Crimes And the crime sections have turned Catalans into experts in criminology, convictions, aggravating and mitigating circumstances, and autopsies, to the point that everyone already knows the case being presented today: the 2008 murder of two National Police trainees in Hospitalet. A deathly silence falls as she reads everything we would know if we were the jury: the culprit's background, the facts, the evidence—it's like a Surfing Sirles album: hair, fingerprints, semen, blood. A camera recorded how the man broke into the blog. "When you enter your home, make sure the door closes behind you; don't let it close on its own," the judge advises.

The audience, hooked on the case, bombards Moreno with questions. They're outraged because the accused isn't obligated to tell the truth, they're furious because a convicted psychopath who'd been in and out of prison for twenty years was given a prison furlough: "If he's such a bad apple, why are they letting him go?" This is one of the underlying issues: "We don't have the death penalty or life imprisonment. Sentences are geared towards rehabilitation. But there are people who are beyond redemption by society," Moreno asks. "What do we do with the most serious psychopaths?"

The jury can deliberate for two days; here at BCNegra, we've already been at it for almost two hours. The verdict is over 100 years, but the maximum sentence that can be served is 40 without furloughs: the man will be released at 75. There's a palpable sense of indignation. "The Penal Code is too lenient," a woman remarks. “I disagree,” someone says from the back of the courtroom. “Making the Penal Code harsher isn’t a deterrent, because if you’re going to get the death penalty, it doesn’t matter whether you kill one person or five.” The judge agrees, and concludes with a phrase reminiscent of kintsugi and a novel: “Justice tries to mend a broken vase, but it can never return the vase to its original state.”