A prominent El Salvadorian defence lawyer claims the court ignored exculpatory evidence in convicting a teenage woman of murder.
Dennis Muñoz told SBS his client, Evelyn Hernandez, suffered a miscarriage when her baby contracted aspiration pneumonia in uturo. He claims this was documented in the coroner’s report.
The case of 19-year-old Evelyn and criticism of El Salvador’s , More than a dozen women have been imprisoned for what they claim were the natural deaths of their babies.
Read a full statement from Dennis Muñoz below [translated from Spanish]:
Evelyn has been sentenced to 30 years in prison for the crime of aggravated homicide. She was firstly denounced by the public hospital and later accused by the Public Prosecutor for the crime of abortion. But later they changed the crime and she was finally accused of aggravated homicide.
On July 5, we received the condemnatory ruling by the Sentence Court of Cojutepeque. They didn’t consider the evidence presented at the hearing. We will continue to fight for Evelyn who has been imprisoned since 6thApril, 2016.
Evelyn was raped but she didn’t report it because of security concerns in relation to herself and her family.
The cause of the baby's death was aspiration pneumonia, according to documentation from the coroner who also mentioned it at the hearing. This is because the foetus inhaled meconium in the uterus. I asked if this was a natural cause of death, and they said yes.
In 1998 a new Penal came into force, which in theory was to increase safeguards and be more in favour of the people. But this was not true with the legislation about abortion because they got rid of the exemptions included in the previous Penal Code, that expressly regulated ethical and therapeutic abortions [for example when the mother’s life is at risk].
As a result of this legal insecurity, El Salvador’s legislation became draconian. Now it turns out that women can’t abort even if they have lymphatic or intrauterine or stomach cancer, even when it is the medical recommendation.
But on top of that the medical staff is reporting spontaneous abortions [such as miscarriages or stillbirths], something that shouldn’t happen anywhere in the world. It’s a violation of the professional secrecy against their patients. They take advantage of their investiture of health professionals to reveal the information they are getting through their profession.
There are actually more than 17 women in jail now. They are women [coming from] conditions of poverty, who don’t even have a basic education. Their sentences go between 30 and 50 years.
