On Sunday, November 7, Leandro Daniel Suarez, accompanied by a 15-year-old minor (perhaps his initials are JR), entered Roberto Sabo’s business and murdered him with six bullets.
The two criminals, not only did they take Roberto’s life but they destroyed several families: they took a son from his parents, a husband from his wife and a father from his teenage children.
Leandro is not new to crime. According to the agency Telam he was imprisoned for five years and ten months for aggravated robbery with weapons and attempted theft; if the weapon was a firearm, the penalty should have been set between six years and eight months and twenty years and, if it was not, between five and fifteen years.
Unfortunately the abolitionist theories led to Leandro being sentenced to a very small penalty; If they had applied reasonable seven or eight years to him, Roberto Sabo would be alive.
His short stint in jail did not help him to reintegrate into society; rather, he quickly reintegrated himself into crime, stealing and killing. Such a slight penalty did not deter him from repeating the crime nor will it prevent third parties from committing crimes; rather the small penalty is a stimulus, a signal for the wrongdoer who perceives that the very low probability of being convicted is complemented by minimal punishments.
The murderous couple had two weapons in their possession; the victim, none. The absurd inclination that important sectors feel towards criminals, makes them circulate armed and honest citizens are defenseless. The underworld gets the weapons it wants, from revolvers to machine guns, in an active black market that sells or rents the “irons.”
To the citizen, possible victim of an assault or murder, the pro reo state will require credentials, psycho-physical examinations, possession and carrying permits and cumbersome renewals. Who, not having satisfied the bureaucracy, defends his home with a weapon, can be punished more severely than his aggressor.
And what about the privileged situation of the murderer, just because she is fifteen years old? First of all, it will be necessary to check if that really is his age or if it is a hoax.
Assuming the alleged fifteen years of age, it is not an acceptable result that his serious crime goes unpunished for a presumption as rigid as it is absurd. To affirm that someone up to 15 years and 364 days does not understand at all the criminality of their acts (hence their absolute unimputability) and that the next day, once they turn 16 years old, they acquire full consciousness is a cynical fantasy.
There is an urgent need to realistically reform the penal regime for minority; if it is not done youth gangs will proliferate that, paradoxically, will not understand the criminality of their acts but will understand their non-imputability.
The action of the police in the face of demands for justice shows another head of the Hydra of abolitionism. In December 2017 the policemen, stationed in front of the National Congress, received a shower of fourteen tons of stones and had in front of the Gordo del mortar, to César Arakaki, to Daniel Ruiz and hundreds of protesters armed with stones and sticks.
In order not to criminalize criminals, the police were ordered to come forward without lethal weapons; he had 88 wounded and only fired gas and rubber bullets when their lives were threatened by protesters.
When this November 8, the police officers confronted Roberto Sabo’s parents, friends and neighbors, angry but peaceful and unarmed, They provoked them by removing their flag from the father of Zaira, murdered in 2018, and then they threw gases.
The orders to be complacent with the violent protesters, with the pickets and with the Mapuches are pure abolitionism and they are only modified when faced, instead of criminals, there are suffering victims.
* The author is a lawyer member of the Civil Association Usina de Justicia
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