In order to mitigate the damage caused by the pain of the news, it would be good to reflect on how we express our opinions on social networks, at dinners with friends or even in our own work environment. It is very difficult to recognise that one's own judgement on important things is not formed.
The fact that the penalty of television news can kill people's lives was made clear on Monday 17 January during the Observatory that PROA held at the Genova Financial Club. The prosecutor of the Supreme Court Javier Zaragozathe magistrate Antonio del Moralthe lawyer Luis Jordana de Pozas and El Mundo journalist Ángela Martialay agreed that the damage that can be caused by the parallel trials to which individuals or entities involved in media court proceedings are subjected can often be irreparable.
The police officers who were accused by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office of taking money from the Chinese mafia in the framework of the Emperor case were exonerated by the Supreme Court eight years after the start of the investigation that stigmatised them in the eyes of society forever. All of them were scarred by the criminal proceedings. During the 'eternity' that the proceedings lasted, some lost their jobs or saw their professional careers cut short; others were passive witnesses of how their personal lives were complicated until they were never the same again; all of them were no longer the same.
The former president of Futbol Club Barcelona between 2010 and 2014, Sandro Rosellspent more than two years in prison on a charge that ultimately proved to be unprovable. His reputation fell to the point of seriously affecting his business. In fact, he is now claiming 30 million euros from the State to compensate for the damage he claims to have suffered in both his professional and personal sphere.
The examples of the havoc that parallel trials have wreaked on individuals and entities are endless. Professor at the Carlos III University of Madrid Carlos Maciá has drawn up a list of more than twenty procedures criminal trials that have degenerated into undesirable media trials for the investigation or for the persons involved in the case.
Supreme Court judge Antonio del Moral resigned himself during his intervention in the aforementioned PROA Observatory. He admitted that there is a high percentage of this damage caused by the media echo and what is disseminated through social networks that results "... in the media...".unavoidable". It has to be assumed, he said, that this is the case and cannot be solved in the future.
The phrase left many in the audience perplexed. Prosecutor Zaragoza justified that it is not part of the criminal process to deal with this collateral damage which takes place during the investigation and always before the judgement. However, even this disclaimer did not satisfy those present, most of whom were members of the legal profession and thus represented the interests of the people who had been harmed by the aforementioned TV news sentence at one time or another.
After reflecting on what was discussed at this conference, I thought it would be good to put in black and white three ideas that in my opinion could help society move towards a solution. Or at least towards harm reduction. The first is to recognise the reality, an essential step prior to any search for solutions: the state is not currently capable of responding to the injustices which provoke, albeit indirectly, processes that in theory are designed to do justice. It is difficult to quantify and even more difficult to prove reputational damage, lost profits and, in short, what could have been and was not. But it is even more difficult to compensate with money intangibles lost along the way, such as encouragement, illusion, contacts, good image, friendship, trust or even the loss of close people.
Secondly, I endorse one of the ideas put forward by Martialay and underlined by Jordana de Pozas during her intervention in the aforementioned forum. Defendants should talk more to the pressBoth said in different words. The statute of the public prosecutor's office protects the public prosecutor's office so that it can tell the press how its investigations are progressing. No rule, however, supports the investigated, who, on the contrary, is inhibited by the secrecy of the judicial proceedings that the investigators usually order. Jordana de Pozas gave the example of a company that had been in the media for an alleged corruption affair for which it was later acquitted. Along the way, it lost billions in paralysed business and had to lay off 15,000 people.
Is it not, therefore, that sometimes the parallel trial is more important than the procedural one? The consequences of being subjected to public opinion sometimes have irreparable effects for both natural and legal persons. Hence, as De Pozas and Martialay stressed, it is essential that those involved in a criminal case give importance to this parallel trial from the beginning. In fact, the El Mundo journalist stressed the importance of putting oneself in the hands of professionals. If you have problems with the justice system, seek a lawyer quickly, why not also require an expert on public opinion when the issue is of clear media significance?
Finally, the debate made me reflect deeply on one of the ideas that I myself highlighted in the presentation. The problem of parallel judgements is directly linked to one of the essence of the human being, this the tendency we all have to prejudge and judge our neighbours. We are unable to recognise that in the vast majority of cases we do not have sufficient data to make this value judgement. Nor are we able to understand that if we express this inconsistent opinion and share it with other people as if it really were a proven truth, we are contributing to increasing the snowball of parallel judgement and even to building fake news. And I am not only talking about what we can say about a neighbour, but also about who we see in the media, because it is also people who appear on the news.
Of course, inconsistent value judgements are not only made at dinner parties with friends. These are perhaps the least dangerous to the victim's reputation. Social networks have become an uncontrolled playground where an anonymous profile with hundreds of thousands of followers or the account of an expert video game influencer has more impact on the generation of pre-judgements in the heads of users than the formed opinion of any specialist. The first two launch jabs that twist people's opinions in an instant. The latter are addressed to reason, and reason requires a longer process to imprint character on the receiver. As always, it is good to look inside oneself first and then analyse the outside with clear eyes.