“To the most excellent Mr. Jaime Milans del Bosch y Ussía, lieutenant general of the army, for a completed crime of military rebellion, included in article 287 of the Code of Military Justice, he is sentenced to 30 years of imprisonment”. With enormous expectation, on June 3, 1982, the sentence against those responsible for the attempted coup of February 23 was read. Milans del Bosch and the lieutenant colonel of the Civil Guard Antonio Tejero were considered the leaders of the rebellion and the court-martial applied maximum penalties to them, unlike the mastermind of the coup whom both pointed to: General Alfonso Armada was only considered a conspirator and sentenced to six years in prison. The disputes between Armada and the other two main coup plotters were constant during the trial, which lasted three months (from February 19) at the Army Geographic Service in Madrid.

The Constitutional Court rejected the first appeal for protection from one of the convicted in the sentence on the Independence bid, in this case Jordi Turull. However, it did so with two dissenting opinions that have been made public this Wednesday and which contain an important legal ammunition to support an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The authors of the dissenting opinion are two magistrates, the Catalan Juan Antonio Xiol and the Andalusian María Luisa Balaguer, of progressive tendency and who defend that their position in favour of some of the defence's arguments is more in tune with the European judicial doctrine than the one defended by the majority, formed by seven magistrates.