The Supreme Court has confirmed the sentence of almost 50 years in prison for a young man who held his partner, who was 16 at the time, for 35 days and subjected her to all kinds of physical and psychological abuse. The accused, 19 years old at the time, alleged drug dependence and alcohol abuse to appeal the sentence, but the high court ruled out both circumstances and confirmed the conviction for seven crimes: attempted murder, illegal detention, continued sexual assault, habitual physical and mental abuse, crime against moral integrity, injuries in the area of with a dangerous instrument and continued threats.
The events on which the Criminal Court has ruled occurred in Fuenlabrada (Madrid), between October 18 and November 23, 2021. EH and AM had been dating since July and he proposed that they go to spend a few days at the house where the boy lived with his father and his partner. He convinced the teenager, as the judges have proven, with the promise that she was going to live “a fairy tale” and he would treat her “like a queen.”
She accepted and did not tell her parents, thinking that she would be gone for a short time. However, she lived through a hell of 35 days in which EH had her permanently under control to ensure that she did not contact her surroundings or leave her room or her house if she was not accompanied by him. In the room they shared, in addition to insults and humiliation, he continuously beat her and savagely raped her. The sentence emphasizes that the “virulence, vileness and cruelty” of the attacks caused the young woman to live in “an environment of absolute terror.”
The attacks that began in the young man’s father’s house continued in another one where EH decided to move with the teenager on November 5. The aggressor rented a room in a shared apartment where two men who were brothers and the partner of one of them lived.
“Once in the new home, E. progressively increased his vile purpose,” point out the judges, who consider it proven that the minor could have died if she had not received health care on November 23. That day, the girl “had her entire body so bruised, swollen and bloody from the numerous and brutal beatings she received, that she was on the verge of losing her life due to her physical and emotional deterioration,” the magistrates warn. Despite this, EH attacked him again, but this time, the girl’s screams alerted her roommates, who entered the room and helped the young woman.
In the appeal presented to the Supreme Court, the accused tried to discredit the victim’s story and questioned the coincidence between what the minor said and what the young people with whom they shared a flat declared. The ruling of the Criminal Chamber, for which he has been a speaker, rejects this argument and warns: “It is the victim’s own body, lacerated and injured in its entirety, in a very serious way and in multiple ways, reliable corroboration of his testimony.” The doctors who treated her at the hospital to which she was transferred confirmed the multiple injuries at the trial and stressed that the girl had internal and external bleeding, “which if it had not been treated quickly at the hospital, would have led to her death.”
