“The sentence does not conform to us, but it relieves us. A simple homicide means that he he must have realized that driving like this could kill someone. He can no longer say that he did not know what he was doing. I was going with excess of speed, I was going zigzagging, I was crossing traffic lights in red. If it wasn’t Cinthia, it would have been someone else, because what he wanted was to get to the bowling alley. “
Gabriela Choque’s voice was accurate. It was clear, even from behind a mask. After hearing the condemnation of 9 years and 3 months from prison to Veppo, he had dried his tears and had done what so many relatives of victims in Argentina are used to doing: carrying a photo of their dead relative with the legend “Justice” on a poster, stamped on a T-shirt or hanging around the neck and talk to the media.
“This encourages other relatives of victims who are awaiting sentencing. It helps to begin to take the rulings of road accidents more harshly,” he told TN journalist Marina Abiuso. “Most of the cases are labeled as wrongful death.”
Before, she had been all morning and noon standing at the door of the Courts, awaiting the reading of the sentence imposed on Eugenio Veppo, the journalist who on September 8, 2019 ran over and killed to his sister, Cinthia.
From start to finish, the oral trial had been for Zoom. And at 1 p.m. on Tuesday, when the process restarted after a quarter intermission, she and her siblings, her parents, her husband and her children were scattered along Lavalle Street, with the image of Cinthia hanging at the neck, sight on screen and connected to headphones, listening to virtual reading.
Around, so did her sister’s companions, city government traffic officers, dressed in a light blue and yellow suit, the same one that Cinthia and her companion wore. Santiago Siciliano when they were doing a road control and Veppo with his car ran over them.
“Did they understand the same as I did?” Gabriela asked. She had prepared herself for the moment of sentencing. He knew that he had to be attentive to two circumstances: the cover with which they fixed Veppo’s sentence and everything that followed after the word “condemn.” But when the moment came it clouded over.
He did not record how many years in jail they had given him. Heard the word simple homicide, the rating that she and her family had requested, the most serious, the one that realized that her sister’s death had not been the product of unintentional negligence, but she did not know if everything had gone well, until the rest were done. confirmed it.
“My mother said ‘We managed to get justice done’ and only then did we embrace,” she says three hours after the ruling, already at her home in Piñeyro, Avellaneda. In the environments of that same house, in the days before his conviction, he wandered, sleepless.
“Today I think I’m going to go back to sleep. I haven’t done it since the allegations. “
In that judicial instance in which each party -complaint, defense and prosecutor- request the qualifications and penalties that they consider fair for the accused, Gabriela’s dream was not altered by what the defense requested, but by the statement of the prosecutor Fernando Klappenbach, who had asked that Veppo be sentenced to five years and 10 months in prison for culpable homicide (translated: without intention) for the death of Cinthia and serious culpable injuries, generated to Santiago Siciliano.
Cinthia’s family, on the other hand, had demanded a harsher sentence and a more serious qualification, “murder with eventual intent”, a cover that the Oral Criminal Court No. 14 ended up confirming. “There are very few crimes punishable by this cover. In the City of Buenos Aires I think this is the second case. I hope this generates a preceding, that the penalties for those who kill at the wheel are harsher. It is necessary that the people who drive begin to be aware of their actions. Veppo left my nieces without their mother and that has no return ”.
Gabriela has known for a long time what an allegation is and what makes a simple homicide different from a wrongful death. She didn’t learn it when she found out that her sister had died after being run over and abandoned, but before.
For two years he was part of the “Federal Network for the Assistance of Victims and Relatives of Victims of Road Accidents.” He was formed to contain and traveled the country listening to testimonies of people who had lost a loved one in a sinister road – he will never say an accident.
“Many family members were left with the fact that the person responsible for the murder had been given three years, two years on hold, and they felt that the life of their loved one was worth nothing. That has to stop. It cannot be that the rule is that road killers have more rights than their victims. It is as if they have more rights simply because they are alive. Many times the Justice – and in our case it happened to us with the prosecutor – forget that that same person is the one who took away all the rights of the other by killing her.
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source https://pledgetimes.com/veppo-case-the-sentence-does-not-conform-to-us-but-it-relieves-us/
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