6 April 2017
The Supreme Court upholds an appeal in cassation brought by Sánchez-Cervera Abogados concerning the costs of the private prosecution.
Our client had been the victim of an intentional hit-and-run with a vehicle, events that were tried before the Provincial Court of Guadalajara, which handed down a conviction for the crime of attempted manslaughter, a qualification that coincided with that requested by the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the private prosecution exercised by this office.
However, the Court decided to exclude the costs of the private prosecution from the costs award.
In its recent judgment, the Supreme Court upheld our appeal and validated its well-known doctrine that the general rule is that when costs are imposed on the person convicted of a crime, the costs of the private prosecution are also included, unless there is the exceptional circumstance that the latter’s action was notoriously useless or superfluous, which had not been the case in the case analysed, as the Supreme Court rightly pointed out. Even more so when the judgment of the Provincial Court had included a request that was a direct consequence of the intervention of the private prosecution regarding the amount of compensation.
The Supreme Court concludes that: ‘It is evident that the intervention of the private prosecution in the proceedings – coinciding with the criminal petition made by the Public Prosecutor’s Office – in the present case, has been neither superfluous, useless nor dilatory’, and adds ‘On the contrary, the injured party for the crime, a crime of the seriousness stated in the factum of the sentence, appeared and claimed what he considered to be appropriate in the exercise of his right, being a correct intervention on the whole’.
The Supreme Court, on the basis of the arguments described above, upheld the appeal and overturned the judgment of the Provincial Court of Guadalajara in the sense of extending the sentence to include the costs incurred by the private prosecution.
Several newspapers in the province of Guadalajara have echoed the news, and you can read it by clicking here.
