Judge who released Israel Vallarta applied the same criteria as in the Cassez case

Judge Mariana Vieyra Valdés applied the same criteria with which the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) ordered the release of French citizen Florence Cassez in the Israel Vallarta Cisneros case, and dismissed 13 testimonies from the six victims who claimed to have been kidnapped by the gang of kidnappers known as Los Zodiaco.

In the 465-page ruling, the justice administrator who ordered Vallarta Cisneros’s release stated: “In this case, it is deemed that the legal principle of res judicata applies, and therefore, this judge must take into consideration the determination issued by the SCJN when ruling on direct amparo review 157/2011 as the basis for issuing this ruling.

“This is because, although that amparo lawsuit was filed by a person other than the person on trial here, the fact is that the criminal proceedings that gave rise to the action challenged in that guarantees lawsuit were a separate case from this file; Therefore, both proceedings have a common core, derive from the same preliminary investigations, and share multiple pieces of evidence.”

The ruling states that in the arrest of Israel Vallarta and Florence Cassez, “the country’s High Court determined that there was a staging unrelated to reality, which resulted in a corrupting effect on the process, therefore deeming the evidence presented in the case file illegal, which permeated the trial stage and, of course, the first and second instance sentences issued against the co-defendant.”

It is emphasized that the media’s broadcast of the alleged arrest operation of Israel Vallarta and the French citizen, as well as the release of kidnapping victims, caused “a lack of reliability in the evidentiary material due to the arbitrariness of the authority, which would inevitably produce a corrupting effect on the entire procedure, vitiating both the procedure itself and its results,” since “they constituted a staging.” unrelated to reality.”

Regarding the statements of the kidnapping victims, the judge decided not to “grant them probative value because it is impossible to distinguish which part of their testimony is neutral and which was involuntarily induced. Especially since it is observed that their testimonies changed with each statement to incriminate more people and in a more serious manner.”

She noted in her ruling that “although it is true that the victims may recover memories, the truth is that in this case these memories could have been influenced by the televised montage and even by the ministerial authorities themselves.”

Judge Vieyra Valdés concluded in her ruling that “with this evidence, it is not possible to establish the defendant’s guilt,” since all the actions of the Federal Police officers and the Public Ministry agents were invalid because they were obtained under torture, and there were flaws in the statements of the witnesses who came forward to legally support the case against Israel Vallarta.