Thread by @olabini

Yesterday we had the final part of the pre-trial against me. This should have happened in September 2019, but was delayed for a long time, with a range of excuses from the judge. The latest delay was over 6 months long, from the second part of the hearing until the final. 1/25

At the end of the previous part, the judge had heard all the arguments from both my defense and from the prosecution, and the goal was for the judge to come up with a resolution about whether to call me to trial, and whether to exclude any evidence from the trial. 2/25

As I mentioned a few days ago, a week ago we asked for the judge to be removed from my case, because she has illegally delayed the hearing by such an extreme amount, that it is clear that she has infringed my legal rights for justice. 3/25

Even though a petition for recusation has to be accepted within 72 hours of the presentation, it took almost exactly 7 days for the judge to accept it, and send out a notification to the judge. This notification arrived about 3 hours before the hearing started. 4/25

What this means is that the judge in my case had been recused and notified of this recusal several hours before the hearing. Irrespective of this fact, she continued as if nothing was wrong and delivered her resolutions in the case. 5/25

What this actually implies from a legal standpoint is not exactly clear. We might have to wait for the resolution of the recusation process to understand whether the hearing that happened yesterday even has legal weight or not. 6/25

As usual in my case, we keep hitting these strange situations in the Ecuadorean legal system, which no-one has encountered before. Mostly, the reason for these problems comes from clear manipulation by unknown actors. In the recusation case, the delay and change of judge. 7/25

The hearing itself lasted maybe 15 minutes in total. For most of this time - maybe 12 minutes - the judge did a review of things that had happened in the case. This review was quite strange - my lawyers said afterwards that many of the things said had no place in this phase. 8/25

To me, these 12 minutes sounded like a preparation for a defense by the judge, against the complaint of unreasonable delays. It really sounded like the judge tried to justify the reasons for the delays, and blaiming others for them. It wasn't very convincing, though. 9/25

In this hearing, we once again heard a large number of extremely strange and clearly illegal opinions. There are too many to cover here, but I'll mention a few of them as we go along. 10/25

The one that really shocked me, was when the judge said that since I have defense lawyers, violations against my rights in the process ("nullities") are impossible. So, if you have lawyers, the functionaries of the government CAN'T violate your rights. That's what she said. 11/25

During the whole hearing, the judge continually used the phrase "the presumed crime". This is the same language the prosecution uses, but is not appropriate for a judge to use - since a judge has to be impartial, and using this phrasing implies pre-judgement and bias. 12/25

In the previous parts of the pre-trial, my defense team spent at least 4 hours presenting many different legal reasons why many pieces of evidence should be excluded. These arguments were varied and covered most of the evidence. 13/25

Some of the arguments had to do with the question of whether "expert witnesses" (peritos) were actually certified as peritos during the time frame they worked on evidence in my case. If not, that evidence can't be used. 14/25

But, this argument about peritos were only one among many others. Most evidence had two legal reasons to be excluded, and a lot of it more than two reasons. However, the judge accepted _all_ the evidence against me. 15/25

In the case of the question of expert witnesses, the judge argued that since she did NOT have evidence that they were certified during the time frame, she assumed that they were - and thus the evidence could be admitted. Obviously this goes against "pro reo". 16/25

And what about the rest of the legal arguments for exclusion of evidence? It was not even mentioned. The judge never talked about those reasons at all. She never presented a legal argument against them. There was no discussion AT ALL. All the evidence was simply accepted. 17/25

When calling to trial, it is important that the judge specifies exactly what the charged crime is, and what evidence is used to justify going to trial. In the case of my pretrial, no list of evidence was used at all. And no specification of the crime, either. 18/25

Specifically, the judge never specified which "action verb" was relevant to the accusation against me. I'm being charged under article 234 of COIP. But this article specifies several different actions, for several different purposes. 19/25

Properly speaking, to be called to trial, the crime has to be defined. In the case of 234, the action and the purpose has to be specified in the pretrial. This never happened. And there's a very simple reason why the judge never did so. Because the prosecutor never did. 20/25

And you might ask, why did the prosecutor never do it? Once again, the answer is simple. Even IF I had done what the prosecution claims I did, that would STILL not count as a crime according to article 234. The prosecutions story doesn't match any of the verbs in 234. 21/25

So, it would be impossible for the prosecutor to specify the action and purpose, since that would contradict the description he has given of my actions. So instead, they simply don't specify it, and the judge plays along. 22/25

As usual, the hearing yesterday was a complete farce. In 15 minutes, the judge managed to violate my rights in at least 4 ways. I wish I could say I was surprised about the outcome - but I was not. But I was surprised about the depths of injustice displayed once again. 23/25

I expected bad, but this was even worse. Now, we have to wait for the written resolution from the judge. If the judge fixes the above errors, that will lead to a contradiction between the oral and the written part of the hearing - another legal violation. 24/25

Or if the written resolution says the same things, it confirms the above problems. After this, a tribunal of 3 judges will be "randomly" selected, and they will take over the process and call to trial. Our hope is that these judges will be more interested in actual justice. 25/25