The rhetorical capacity of Cipolletti’s chief prosecutor was not enough to convince a judge about the controversial access to information carried out by an official of the Public Ministry. Santiago Márquez Gauna appeared in the arguments of the trial against the son of Ruth Montecino with a single objective: defend Luis Guerra from a serious accusation.
Carlos Vila, defender of the defendant and skillful ex-judge removed, proved that the judicial employee obtained sensitive data from his client without a court order. It was Guerra himself who indicated without any modesty how he had obtained the information that was used against Franco Hernández, son of the drug leader, accused in this trial for the crime of coercion.
Information diving, also called cyber patrolling, is a now common practice of the Cipolletti prosecutor’s office that is even used to discredit the counterpart’s witnesses, some defenders assured.
Guerra asserted that by simply sending an email to the telephone companies, he could access geolocation data and sheet records, with theincoming and outgoing calls among other sensitive information.
The case opened a debate in Cipolletti
The issue opened a controversial question about the scope of the allegedly illegal investigation in Cipolletti. It is that Guerra is the head of the Logistics and Litigation area, a department that has no place in the organization chart of the Attorney General and that it does not work in the rest of the constituencies of the Judicial Power of Río Negro. It was created by the chief prosecutor himself, Márquez Gauna, and Guerra agreed there without competition.
I believe that the defender is partially right regarding the interference of the prosecutor’s office through a hierarchical employee such as Guerra to request reports related to the data traffic of the subscriber Franco Hernández, an issue that exceeds the framework of the investigative task of the Public Prosecutor’s Office ”.
Judge Alejandra Berenguer, in the reading of the liability ruling.
as told BLACK RIVER, The closing of the trial against Hernández was crossed by a high-profile legal discussion between Marquez Gauna and Vila on access to information that could violate the right to privacy.
The opponents in the judicial arena have a spicy precedent in the case for the crime of Facundo Castillo in Cipolletti. Vila is one of the defenders of Ramiro Gutiérrez, the defendant, and on several occasions they exchanged chicanes and strong arguments. What’s more, Vila came to challenge him even though he didn’t get it.
Are the summaries coming?
In the case of Franco Hernández, Márquez Gauna went exclusively to the trial to discuss this evidence that had no interference in the debate, as Judge Alejandra Berenguer said in Franco Hernández’s declaration of responsibility. In addition, the magistrate, upon closing the verdict, agreed with Vila and ruled that Guerra’s work was illegal: Are the summaries coming?
Márquez Gauna referred only to the geolocation data that he defined as “metadata” but said nothing about the list of calls that he can access the official without a warrant among other sensitive data that affect privacy.
The Chief Prosecutor weeks ago he had questioned a public defense colleague for wasting state resources. In any case, in this trial he himself became entangled in a sterile discussion that contributed nothing to the solution sought by the victim, who was also a victim of gender violence. The hearing lasted almost three hours and most of the time was due to the self-centered legal crusade which included jurisprudence of the United States not applicable in Argentina.
“I believe that the defender is partially right regarding the interference of the prosecution through a hierarchical employee such as Guerra to request reports regarding the data traffic of the subscriber Franco Hernández, an issue that exceeds the framework of the investigative task of the Public Prosecutor’s Office,” the judge said in the verdict.
Berenguer used the national and provincial constitution and the personal data law to argue that the judicial employee overreached his investigative task. He confirmed that to obtain the data he accessed, a court order is needed. “It is not publicly accessible information,” concluded the magistrate.
He added that the prosecutor, despite his defense argument of the procedure, failed to undermine constitutional principles: “we are not talking here only about geolocation or metadata since according to Guerra, information that is not public is accessed in a fairly simple way.”
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