Argentine who stabbed girlfriend 75 times gets 5-year sentence

BUENOS AIRES - A court in southern Argentina sentenced a man to five years in jail for killing his girlfriend by stabbing her 75 times and beating her with a dumbbell, media reports said.

In a unanimous verdict that was harshly criticised by the prosecuting attorney and the victim’s family, the judges ruled that the deliberate drinking of alcohol before the crime made Ramon Sosa, 32, behave negligently and without criminal intent.

“We can find no way to understand the reasoning of the court,” prosecutor Eduardo Luis Rodriguez Trejo said. He had asked for a sentence of 15 years in jail and said that he will appeal the ruling handed down Thursday by the court of the city of General Roca.

Sosa received the maximum sentence established by the Penal Code for manslaughter, while the prosecution had initially asked that he be found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison, considering that the defendant well understood the criminality of what he was doing.

The judges took into account Sosa’s defence, that he told psychiatrists he remembered what happened before and after killing Laura Nahuelcar, 22, but not what happened while he was brutally attacking her.

After committing the crime at his home in General Roca Feb 27, 2008, the man went outside and told a neighbour what happened and before the police arrived tried to commit suicide by slitting his veins.

During the trial the motive of the homicide and the relationship between Sosa and Nahuelcar were never established, since no one in the victim’s family knew who he was, but police who arrested him on the night of the murder said Sosa told them he killed the woman because she had been unfaithful to him.

“This is not justice, this is injustice. You can’t give the same sentence for killing someone as for stealing a bicycle,” said the victim’s father Juan Carlos Nahuelcar, who also intends to appeal the court’s decision.

In Argentina, appeals against acquittals or adverse rulings to the prosecution’s case may be lodged with the Supreme Court of Justice.

–EFE