The court refuses to compensate a man imprisoned for 15 years for rape after being mistaken for another man.

BarcelonaThe National Court has dismissed a man's appeal seeking compensation from the State after spending 15 years in prison after being mistaken for a rapist who acted in the early 1990s. The citizen appealed the Ministry of Justice's rejection in 2023, and that same year, the Supreme Court overturned the 1992 ruling by the Barcelona Provincial Court, which sentenced the man to 24 years in prison for two counts of rape and two counts of rape. The high court upheld the appeal based on semen found in one victim's underwear, which did not genetically match that of the convicted man, and ruled that the confusion was due to the fact that he resembled a man who had committed at least one crime.

The man was released on parole on September 18, 2006, after serving more than three-quarters of his sentence. He spent 15 years in Can Brians prison awaiting a pardon that never came, even though the Supreme Court had recommended it and the chief prosecutor of Catalonia, José María Mena, had requested it in 1999. Therefore, in his appeal, he sought compensation of 3.6 million euros—with corresponding legal interest—with corresponding legal interest.

However, the National Court has rejected the administrative claim, arguing that, for the purposes of the compensation sought, "a review judgment is not sufficient; it must infer a gross or evident error" and it does not find that the Barcelona Court committed either. Thus, the National Court upholds the decision of the Ministry of Justice, which refused to compensate him due to two circumstances: unlawful pretrial detention and a judicial error. Regarding the former, it indicates that his sentence was already correctly calculated when the sentence was calculated. It directly rules out judicial error.

DNA Testing

The defense argued that a report confirmed that the semen residue recovered from a victim's underwear, analyzed in 1992 by the Barcelona forensic police and which did not match the convicted man's genetic profile, "never" came to the attention of the court because the experts came to testify "despite it being admissible evidence." The list of evidence also included the victim's statement—whose witness was "the only evidence taken into consideration by the Provincial Court" for the conviction—who later acknowledged in an interview her "mistake" in identifying her attacker.

The National Court, however, explains that the review was based on expert evidence that was dismissed by the Barcelona Court on reasoned grounds, even though it did not mention certain biological remains. Even so, "the same ruling goes so far as to question whether the clothing containing these remains belonged to the victim" and concludes that the evidence was not ignored, but rather assessed and reasonably rejected.

A physically similar detainee

It all began in 1991, when several rapes occurred in the Barcelona and Tarragona areas. The convicted man and a second man were imprisoned for these crimes, as if they had acted together, although a 1993 Civil Guard report acknowledged there was no evidence they knew each other.

The first man was initially charged with 17 crimes, but was eventually sentenced to over 100 years in prison for four rapes and one robbery. However, the only evidence against him was the alleged "acknowledgments" from the victims. The second man, who also always maintained his innocence and refused to accept compensation of 18 million pesetas from the State after the Supreme Court overturned the sentence, died of a heart attack in prison in 2000. A few years after the rapes were very similar to those of another very similar man. Thanks to DNA evidence, the Civil Guard was able to prove that one of the four rapes the convicted man was committed by the second man. However, no analyzable tissue or biological remains were preserved for the other three rapes, so they still attributed three sexual assaults to him.