The five defendants in the Castelldefels gang agreed to minimum sentences of between three and eight years in prison.

BarcelonaA plea deal has resolved the Castelldefels Manada trial before it began on Tuesday. The five defendants accepted a sentence imposing minimum sentences. While the initial request by the Prosecutor's Office had exposed them to between 28 and 53 years in prison each, the sentences they ultimately face range from 3 years and 11 months to 8 years and 5 months. Therefore, while the public prosecutor's request totaled 196 years for all defendants, the sentences, combined, are 32 years and seven months in prison for all five defendants. With the sentence accepted by the five defendants, they are convicted of the assaults and of belonging to a criminal group for committing crimes against sexual freedom.

The ninth section of the Barcelona Court of Appeals has orally delivered the sentence, which is the result of an agreement between the defense and prosecution parties. Lawyers and the prosecution presented their agreement to the court on Friday, and it was formalized this Tuesday, when the trial was scheduled to begin. This way, the victims have not had to repeat the details of the assaults in court more than four years later—everything occurred between March and May 2021—since, according to judicial sources, in this case, the recording of their statements during the investigation phase had not been kept to be used as evidence.

After the sentence was made public, the prosecution issued a statement explaining that a key reason for agreeing to these sentences was "the need to protect the victims as well as their desire not to be revictimized and subjected to the pressure of this trial again." The prosecution even added that there was a risk that the trial would have to be suspended because one of the victims was suffering from a post-traumatic stress disorder that made it impossible for her to testify, which would have required lengthening the proceedings for all of them.

The lawyer for one of the victims, Manel Margarit, also described the agreement as a "very good deal" because it puts the victims' interests first, avoiding a trial that would have lasted almost two weeks and in which around fifty pieces of expert evidence were scheduled.

They are asking to be released from prison now.

The defendants entered prison in December 2022., and given the sentences they have been given, their lawyers have requested that they be released because they have already served a large portion of their sentences and have completed prison rehabilitation courses. The court has declined to rule on this today, but will do so in the coming days. As the five men have already been incarcerated for two years and nine months, judicial sources indicate that the defendant with the lowest sentence could be released on parole imminently, and two others could do so in the coming months.

The attacks always took place in the apartment of one of the men. It was the time of the pandemic, and while bars and clubs were closed due to the spread of the coronavirus, members of the so-called Castelldefels Gang invited girls to their home as if it were a party. Messages found on their phones during the investigation revealed that they selected the girls they wanted to attack, even discussing among themselves whether they thought any of them would be "capable" of reporting the incident.

In the written statement that ARA has been able to review, the five defendants acknowledge that they focused on seeking out girls who "for whatever medical or personal reason, had low self-esteem" to invite them with the aim of sexually assaulting them, creating "a climate of subjugation that diminished them."

Confession and compensation

To reduce the defendants' sentences, the mitigating factor of their late confession was taken into account—because the agreement implies that they admit to the assaults, but their confession has not helped resolve the investigation—as well as the fact that they have already deposited the total compensation payments to the victims. In fact, after an initial round of speaking, in which the five responded in monosyllables and accepted the sentence, the prosecution demanded that they show remorse in court, as they had agreed in the plea agreement.

The court then returned the floor to the defendants, who apologized "for any inconvenience" they "may have caused," in the words of one of them, and expressed "absolute and total remorse." They also emphasized the efforts made to raise the compensation money. Between the five, they will pay just over €100,000 in total to compensate the three victims for physical, psychological, and moral damages. This is less than half of the €212,325 the total compensation claimed by the Prosecutor's Office before the agreement.

In addition to the crime of belonging to a criminal group, all are convicted as perpetrators, co-perpetrators, or necessary collaborators, as the case may be, for the sexual assaults of three victims. In the Prosecutor's Office's initial indictment, in fact, they were charged with a continuing crime of sexual assault, which the sentence ultimately does not include. Also excluded from the sentence is the crime of disclosure of secrets for distributing sexual recordings of one of these three victims and a fourth girl, who had agreed to have sex but refused to be recorded, and yet they did so. According to judicial sources, this crime was ultimately removed from the indictment because the images were sent in single-view mode.