Acquittal Judgment for a Continuing Offence of Document Forgery

Our client, an official of the procedural and administrative management corps, was accused by the Public Prosecutor's Office of a continuing offence of forgery of a public document, for allegedly issuing certain judicial documents from her user account on the Justice Administration's computer system, as well as for forging the signature of the presiding judge of the court and of the Judicial Administration Clerk that appeared at the foot of those documents.

Our defence strategy dismantled the prosecution's case on two complementary fronts. First, we established that the fact the documents had been issued from our client's username and password did not necessarily mean that she was their material author, since the system's access credentials were known to all court staff and were kept in a location accessible to any official. Second, we tested the handwriting expert report carried out in the case, whose conclusions — confirmed at trial — determined that the disputed signatures were forgeries by imitation, but without the report itself being able to state whether they had been made by our client's hand, since that question had not formed part of the expert's brief.

Against this, the Public Prosecutor's Office produced no direct witness who had seen our client sign or issue the disputed documents, with third parties' acknowledgement of the facts being limited to out-of-court statements made without the proper caution as to their rights. The court, applying the principle of in dubio pro reo and expressly citing Supreme Court case law on the insufficiency of the evidential value of police statements not confirmed at trial with full guarantees, concluded that a reasonable doubt remained that prevented the presumption of innocence from being overturned. The result was a full acquittal judgment, declaring our client free of all criminal liability for the continuing offence of document forgery of which she had been accused, with costs declared to be borne by the State.