The Superior Court of Justice of Madrid (TSJM) has confirmed three sanctions that total 150 days of suspension for a sub-inspector of the National Police assigned to the Superior Headquarters of the Balearic Islands who took advantage of his position to access private information of an accused whom he , a year later, he defended himself as a lawyer within the framework of an investigation for alleged crimes of human trafficking, induction into prostitution and against public health. The ruling, which specifies that the practice of law is compatible with that of the police, criticizes, however, that in this case the activity carried out was expressly excluded from the compatibility that the agent was authorized to have since it was directly related to the functions carried out by the General Directorate of the Police, to which he was assigned as an active official.
Through a resolution to which elDiario.es has had access, the Seventh Section of the Contentious-Administrative Chamber has thus dismissed the appeal filed by the police officer against the resolution issued by the General Directorate of the Police on October 14, 2022. , which imposed three very serious sanctions translated into 150 days of suspension from office.
The events date back to December 2, 2020, when the agent was on duty, on an afternoon shift, at his job in the Territorial Operational Coordination Unit (UCOT). At one point, he took advantage of his position in the force to access several police applications with his passwords in order to consult the file of an investigator whom he would later defend. In his search, the official consulted several reports in which he was interested in the arrest of the person who would later become his client, as well as data on the complainants and the international search warrant for the accused. The investigations were at that time in the hands of the Provincial Immigration and Border Brigade of the National Police.
As the magistrates point out, all the consultations were carried out without any professional justification, only for personal purposes, giving rise to the circumstance that, on June 16, 2021, the police officer assisted the citizen as a defense attorney during a trial. held in the Courts of Palma.
The policeman defends his actions
In his appeal, the agent alleged that he has recognized compatibility for the exercise of the private activity of law on his own account and that, in this case, the General Directorate of the Police has used the sanctioning procedure “to purify the situation of incompatibility that accuses the official.” The police officer also criticized the fact that the body responsible for recognizing compatibility does not clearly state the limits and sticks to generalities that “put at risk the actions of those who consider themselves naively supported” by such a resolution.
The police official criticized the “erratic precision” of the facts for which he was punished, stating that “there was never any arrest” of his client, “he could not be assisted as he was not in Spain, nor was his defense ever assumed in judicial proceedings.” some”. Along these lines, he regrets that the incompatibility was put forward due to the fact that he was on active duty in the General Directorate of the Police and attended as a substitute lawyer, in June 2021, “a testimonial statement by four witnesses related to an investigation that, As its manager stated, it had ended in June 2020, no less than a year before.”
For its part, the State Attorney’s Office, representing the General Administration, opposed the police officer’s appeal, appealing to the “unnecessarity” of accessing, for professional reasons, the private data accessed by the agent, “even more so given taking into consideration that the queries carried out (such as partial searches by affiliation, certificate number…) by the plaintiff were an approximate number of up to forty queries for which not even the appellant in his statements was able to give a reason.”
“Taking advantage of his police position, the plaintiff accessed data in police databases related to a matter of which he had knowledge exclusively through his professional work as a lawyer, thereby failing to comply with the regulations established on compatibility in the exercise of his duties.” functions,” the Lawyer emphasized, emphasizing that the authorization of compatibility was granted with the safeguard, in any case, of the provisions of articles 1.3 and 11.1 of the Law 53/1984, on Incompatibilities, which prevent officials from exercising, on their own or through substitution, private activities, including those of a professional nature, whether on their own account or at the service of entities or individuals that are directly related to those carried out by the department. or organization in which he is assigned, as in the case resolved by the TSJM.
“Committed” impartiality
The State’s legal services insist that the impartiality or independence of an official “is in any case compromised when he intervenes in a criminal proceeding on behalf of one of the parties to the process, even when said intervention as a party’s lawyer is of a specific nature, as is the present case.” For this reason, he maintains that, when on June 16, 2021, his colleague asked him to appear as a defense attorney for a person whose data he had previously accessed due to his status as a police officer, “both functions were directly linked, so he incurred with this in functional incompatibility.”
In its ruling, the TSJM specifies that the legal profession is compatible with the performance of the police job, although it clarifies that the compatibility “cannot be full” according to the regulations, “in such a way that it cannot prevent or undermine strict compliance with their duties, that is, they must be exercised with scrupulous respect for the schedule assigned to their job, and their impartiality or independence cannot be compromised with respect to the activities they carry out in the National Police Corps.”
Source: www.eldiario.es
