Diego the Unready (2)

Poor Diego is seemingly the only person to consider this turn of events truly newsworthy — the upholding of the charges as originally presented. 

In the US, and it has to be said that my claim to scholarship of their system is based entirely on movies and TV, District Attorneys seem to profer the lesser charge as a kind of enticement — for they understand that sometimes 'full' guilt is hard to demonstrate beyond all reasonable doubt. 

Yet in such circumstances the downgrade is tendered as a quid pro quo: the defendant has to fess up to the lesser offence. 

Diego Ariel Stella seems to want to do the same deal and yet still have the opportunity to walk away an innocent man, even though it should be obvious to even his most insensate friends and advisors that his best chance of an 'unproven' outcome — in the Scottish sense — is an all-out defence in court against the most prejudicious allegation. 

Meanwhile, whilst I might have mouthed off about my wife's three years of legal travails in her case involving flasher Jason Lever, I don't think I have ever walked out of one of the audiencias only to immediately criticise — and morally censure — by name, the presiding judge. This I believe crosses a line that in the UK we call contempt of court. Whatever else one may imagine one can do within a legal process, direct criticism of the judge is always a no-no. *

And, as I mentioned in the previous post, this reader has had his fair-minded, 'objective' view of the case recalibrated by Diego's own testimony relating to the specific events in the bedroom, which comes across as self-incriminating. 

It strikes me that Stella's ghost writer has erroneously concluded that the best approach here is to anticipate Verónica Molina's account of that morning and then lay alongside it a version that accurately resembles that which a seriously confused male might report.

It's a tactic that is consistent with the Argentinian's intention of appearing gentlemanly, but manifests as spurious. 

He seems to have become handcuffed by the story he originally gave to INACIF, along with the tension he faces between two basically incompatible urges: to play the gent whilst gent-ly marking his accuser as a bunny-boiler. 

All these problems derive from the bad advice he was given at the start. I have witnessed his (former) lawyer in action, and her arguments almost never result in incremental gains. Once their credibility is questioned they collapse, leaving her client worse off than before. Her approach is obstruction, which always has a do or die quality to it. 

Anyway, those of us with profounder interest in the topic have Ridley Scott's The Last Duel to look forward to. One reviewer I follow complained about having to witness the rape from two, almost identical points of view, thereby perhaps missing the point the movie is trying to make about the way these narratives are constructed. 

* However, on Friday the pre-eminent judge Rocael Girón rejected an appeal by Stella's defence team and the MP, 'para privilegiar el principio de publicidad y la libertad de expresión y de emisión de pensamiento.'