The new trial for the death of legendary football player Diego Maradona begins this Tuesday (14) in Argentina after the annulment of the first one a year ago, in which it was discovered that one of the judges participated in a clandestine documentary about the process.
The scandal, which brought down the first trial in May 2025, annulled 20 court hearings and 44 testimonies taken over two and a half months.
The second process, in which around 120 witnesses will be heard, will seek to determine the responsibility of Maradona’s medical team, but with a new focus from the Public Ministry.
“The failed trial and the fact that the defenses became aware of our methods forced us to change strategies, but always with the firm conviction that we will prevent impunity for those responsible,” said prosecutor Patricio Ferrari.
The Argentine football icon died at the age of 60 on November 25, 2020 due to a cardiorespiratory crisis and pulmonary edema in a private residence in Tigre, north of Buenos Aires, where he was recovering from neurosurgery.
Seven health professionals — doctors, psychologists, nurses — who treated him at the time are accused of homicide with possible intent, a figure that implies that they were aware that their actions could lead to the death of the former player.
Defenses maintain that he died of natural causes. “If there is one thing that has been ruled out, it is an intentional criminal plan to kill Maradona. Anyone who continues to maintain this is being cruel to the family and the defendants,” said Vadim Mischanchuk, lawyer for psychiatrist Agustina Cosachov, on Con Vos radio.
The process in San Isidro, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, will feature 30 hearings twice a week and should take place at least until July.
The news of the death of the world champion with Argentina in 1986 brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets in collective mourning amid the covid-19 pandemic.
“Divine Justice”
During the media trial in 2025, images were released of Julieta Makintach, one of the court’s three judges, as the protagonist of a clandestine documentary about the same process in which she was part.
The judge was removed, the trial was annulled and the scandal dominated the headlines in Argentina and abroad.
Titled “Divine Justice”, the documentary showed Makintach walking through the halls of the court with electronic music in the background and then being interviewed in her office.
The judge was removed in November in a political trial.
“Rubbish, you kicked me out because it was all scripted”, shouted one of the defense lawyers, Rodolfo Baqué, who was expelled from the room at the first hearing on Makintach’s orders on the grounds that he was not authorized.
Throughout the first process, both the conditions of hospitalization and the relevance of treating the former football player at his home in Tigre were questioned, an agreement signed between the family and the medical team after neurosurgery.
The medical team carried out an “inhumane plan with an effective result”, said Dalma and Gianinna Maradona’s lawyer, Fernando Burlando. The football star was “murdered” and “in any precarious hospital they would have saved his life”, according to Maradona’s daughter.
“We all believed it was a natural death. Until three days later they called from the Public Prosecutor’s Office and told us that they had possibly killed him. And then the investigation began,” Jana, the fourth of Maradona’s five children, recalled to the Argentine press in March.
Defenses have different strategies for each defendant. The main ones are, in addition to Cosachov, the trusted doctor Leopoldo Luque and the psychologist Carlos Díaz.
The accused face sentences of 8 to 25 years in prison. An eighth defendant will be tried in a separate case.
