The Appeals Section of the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia has unanimously overturned the sentence that sentenced former FC Barcelona player Dani Alves to 4 years and 6 months in prison for the sexual assault of a young woman at the Sutton nightclub in December 2022. In other words, the High Court acquits him in a ruling made public today and which can be appealed. The former footballer has been on provisional release since last March.
In the ruling, the court unanimously accepts the appeal filed by the footballer's defense and dismisses those of the Prosecutor's Office, which requested an increase in the sentence to 9 years in prison, and of the private prosecution (the girl), which requested an increase to 12 years. The Catalan high court concludes that the initial ruling of the case - made public a year ago - presents "a series of gaps, inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and contradictions regarding the facts, legal assessment, and their consequences."
The sentence, notified this Friday, points to a lack of reliability in the testimony of the complainant and specifies that due to "insufficient evidence," it agrees to revoke his conviction, acquit him, and lift the precautionary measures decreed.
The full Appeals Section, composed of magistrates María Àngels Vivas (rapporteur), Roser Bach, María Jesús Manzano, and magistrate Manuel Álvarez, does not share "the conviction of the lower court expressed in its ruling, the reasoning of which throughout contains a series of gaps, inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and contradictions regarding the facts, legal assessment, and their consequences."
The sentence indicates that the appealed ruling already referred to the lack of reliability of the complainant's testimony in the part of the story objectively verifiable by referring to facts that are recorded on video, "explicitly indicating that what is narrated does not correspond to reality"; as well as in the part that affected others that were not recorded, such as the denial of a sexual practice corroborated "with very high probability" by DNA evidence.
The new sentence in the case modifies the narrative of proven facts, rejects that the former footballer sexually assaulted the young woman in the bathrooms of the Sutton nightclub in Barcelona, and simply considers it proven that Alves and the girl "had sexual relations" in the cubicle.
In this case, the Appeals Section states, "the lower court has chosen to embrace a subjective belief of what happened inside the bathroom limited solely to the fact that vaginal penetration was non-consensual, as claimed by the complainant. Justifying the version of non-consensual vaginal penetration with the argument that consent can be changed at any time during the sexual relationship and venturing possible reasons why the complainant may have lied to explain the discrepancies in the story, for reasons of necessity."
It adds that the Provincial Court's ruling, however, "does not clarify why an unverifiable account with no peripheral evidence can be accepted to support a conviction, but originating from a witness who, as we have explained, has proven unreliable in the part of the story that can be contrasted. This is why the generic invocation that opinions can change does not convert or transform the unreliable into reliable, because it affects the truthfulness of the story and this concerns how the proven fact is reconstructed, resulting in the now overturned sentence presenting very significant evaluative deficits, and not having taken extreme precautions to confront the contents provided by the evidentiary activity."