An acquitted ETA member may request compensation after spending three years in provisional prison

The ETA member Miren Itxaso Zaldua, acquitted of the murder of Manuel Giménez Abad, will be able to claim compensation from the State for the three years she has spent in provisional prison. Last Tuesday, Sahatsa was released when the court concluded that there was insufficient evidence to consider her the author of the attack that in May 2001 ended the life of the then president of the PP of Aragon.

The sentence, which will be notified in the coming days, may still be appealed to the Supreme Court, but if it is not appealed or the High Court endorses the acquittal, Sahatsa will have to file a claim for “abnormal operation of the Administration of Justice”.

Traditionally this was a difficult path that rarely ended with compensation. But in 2019 the Constitutional Court opened its hand and established that any pretrial detention that did not end in a conviction was compensable. Until then, those prisons that were justified by the presence of evidence of crime, even if there was no conviction at the end, were not compensated.

After the intervention of the Constitutional Court, the law currently establishes that those who are acquitted, after having suffered preventive detention, will have the “right to compensation […]”.

Three years of pretrial detention

Sahatsa was arrested on this day in 2020, so on Tuesday, when she was released, she had three days left to serve three years of preventive. The National Court recently granted a man imprisoned for Islamism 450,000 euros in compensation for a preventive detention of almost three years.

These types of claims must be submitted to the Ministry of Justice, which usually rejects them or sets a very low amount.. The decision can be appealed to the Court and the Supreme. The amounts are not as large as in the case of the Islamist prisoner, which was a record. The determining factor is the diligence of the claimant to prove the damages suffered, for example by documenting the lost income.

In that sentence on the acquitted of Islamism, the Court recalled that the criteria set by the TC “allows entry to new cases, such as the one raised by the plaintiff, in which a certain damage is appreciated, which derives from the fact of the imprisonment that -agreed in accordance with the legal parameters- subsequently turns out to be an undue imprisonment as a result of the acquittal, unless the time spent in prison has been paid in another criminal case, something that is not stated here”.

The phrase is applicable to Sahatsa, who was only in prison for the murder of Giménez Abad and the three years in prison will not be deducted from another sentence.