Prosecutor also opposes Dolors Bassa’s prison leave to look after her mother
The Public Prosecutor claims it constitutes a “de-facto third grade”, as with the other political prisoners
BarcelonaAs it did with the other political prisoners, the Public Prosecutor’s Office is querying the prison leave which Dolors Bassa has been granted so that she may look after her 89-year-old mother. The Prosecutor argues that the measure “is akin to being classed as a category 3 inmate, albeit on the sly” and that it has been engineered so that Bassa’s case doesn’t get past Girona’s provincial court and never makes it to Madrid’s Supreme Court. Until then, a supervising court will rule on whether Bassa may benefit from Article 100.2 of the prison service rules and regulations, as the Puig de les Basses prison board has recently decided.
In the appeal filed on Monday, the Public Prosecutor states that “the leave means granting a de-facto third grade” [to the former Catalan minister]. It points out that Article 100.2 is supposed to be invoked in “exceptional cases” and that it was never meant to establish “some sort of new category that lies between grades 2 and 3, let alone to provide a means to cover for effectively classing a convict as a category 3 inmate when they do not meet the necessary requirements”. If the prison board and the Catalan authorities had decided to classify Bassa as a grade 3 convict instead of applying Article 100.2, an appeal by the Prosecutor’s Office would have prevented her immediate release from jail. However, now the former Employment minister will be allowed to leave prison on three weekdays for eight hours at a time until the supervising court issues its judgement on the matter.
The Prosecutor remarks that “in order for the care of her mother to be considered to be part of Bassa’s penitentiary treatment, the Prison Board that has advised applying Article 100.2 should indicate what social and family shortcomings the inmate presents and why this leave would have a positive effect on them”. Bassa will not be granted regular leave until February 202, once she has served a quarter of her 12-year prison sentence
