A Coruña: two years in prison for extorting a young man by revealing his sexual orientation to the point of committing suicide
«Rather dead than dominated by anyone ». These were the last words the victim wrote in a note before taking her own life by throwing herself out the window of her house in A Coruña in October 2019. He was being extorted by a man who threatened to reveal his homosexuality to his family and friends if he did not pay him money that he did not have. Now his extortionist has just been sentenced to two and a half years in prison, and is waiting to find out if he has to serve a sentence behind bars.
The first section of the Provincial Court of A Coruña has ratified the sentence imposed by the Criminal Court number 5 of this city for a crime of conditional threats and for which he was sentenced to a two years and six months jail time, as well as the payment of compensation for $9.000 to the victim's family member.
The court accepts in full the facts considered proven in the ruling, according to which, in October 2019, the defendant contacted through the application Bender with the victim, who ended up demanding the sum of a hundred euros in exchange for not spreading or revealing captures related to his homosexuality. The victim even paid that money, although the convict continued to send him WhatsApp messages «pressing»For him to give her more money in exchange for not revealing his sexual orientation.
He didn't kill himself, they killed him
«If I don't talk to you anymore, I'll kill myself. I can not take anymore«The victim replied according to the sentence. In it, it is argued that the condemned "he did not give up his threats»And continued demanding a sum of money from him. Regarding the victim, he adds that «prey to despair and anguish in which he was plunged", committed suicide. Or rather: they killed him. The now condemned man, unaware of this circumstance, continued to send him whatsapps, demanding money and saying that he was going to «embitter" life.
The sentence of the Audience of A Coruña, issued in June, states that «this dramatic ending, despite being alien to the will»Of the condemned«it is the best reflection of the disturbance and anguish created in the victim by the pressure to which the appellant subjected him«He says about the appeal that he presented for his conviction in the first instance.
The judges explain that a person's sexual identity is part of «of its basic core of privacy, over which it has the right to maintain full control and has full decision-making power over the form, the people and the means of making them known, if this were its wish«. In this case, they reason, «it is evident that the victim did not want this knowledge to be public, and even kept it hidden from his closest family circle«.
Neither do the magistrates have any doubts that the convicted man's threats were the ones that led the victim to suicide. «The continuous pressure, the reiteration of the request for money after having received the first payment, were enough to lead the victim to adopt an irreversible and very serious decision«, They say, relying for example on how the young man wrote in his suicide note that this had been«what filled»Your patience.
