Alex Trelinski
FOOTBALLER Dani Alves told a Barcelona court that was not flight risk as it heard arguments for him to be bailed while an appeal is heard against his rape conviction.
Alves was convicted last month of the attack and given a four-and-a-half year jail term.
“I’m not going to run away, I believe in justice,” the player said in court on Tuesday via a videolink from the Brians 2 prison.
The court will soon decide on whether Alves should be released after he was arrested and remanded into custody in January 2023.
The Catalunya High Court of Justice(TSJC) has received appeals from the Prosecutor’s Office and a private prosecution on behalf of the victim that challenge the leniency of the prison sentence.
Lawyers for Alves have presented a different argument calling for an aquittal.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office wants Alves jailed for nine years and has asked the court on Tuesday to keep him in jail, stating that he was a flight risk.
That was backed up by Ester Garcia, acting on behalf of the abused woman, who emphasised the financial resources that Alves had at his disposal.
Alves’ lawyer, Ines Guardiola, argued before the judges that her client has already served a quarter of the sentence imposed on him and that with 25% of time served, he could already access prison leave if he met the other requirement to have them, i.e. if the sentence was final.
She said that process could take months before the different appeals are ruled on by the TSJC and the potential to take the matter still further to the Supreme Court.
At Alves’ February trial, he was found guilty of sexually assaulting a 23-year-old woman in the bathroom of the Sutton nightclub in Barcelona on December 30, 2022.
The court considered it proven that ‘the defendant roughly grabbed the complainant, threw her to the ground and, preventing her from moving, penetrated her vaginally, despite the fact that the complainant said no, and she wanted to leave’.
The court in its judgment said that ‘this fulfils an of absence of consent, with the use of violence, and with carnal access’.
READ NEWS:
- Prosecutors to challenge ‘lenient’ punishment given to convicted rapist Dani Alves by court in Spain
- Dani Alves, 40, is jailed for four years and six months for rape of woman, 23, at a nightclub…
- Dani Alves’ mother doxes his alleged rape victim online in an extraordinary attack: Young woman is due to testify…
