The start of the trial against Daniel Sancho for the death and dismemberment of Colombian surgeon Edwin Arrieta in Thailand has triggered an impressive media display despite the fact that the trial is being held behind closed doors. Speculations about the nature of the relationship between the accused and the victim have sparked the interest of the audience. So has the fact that he is the son of a very famous actor in our country, Rodolfo Sancho, and grandson of an even more famous one, Sancho Gracia, and that he faces a foreign penal code that contemplates the death penalty. In these first days of the judicial process, HBO Max has launched an exclusive interview with Rodolfo Sancho and Darling Arrieta, the sister of the murdered man, has offered statements for the first time for Telecinco. In this type of news coverage, the protection of honor, privacy and one’s own image is a fundamental right enshrined in the Constitution, which clashes with that of information and freedom of expression. “In recent years, jurisprudence has leaned more in favor of the latter,” analyzes Gonzalo León, a lawyer specializing in criminal law. from the Vilches Abogados law firm.
Last November, Daniel Sancho’s family requested precautionary measures against Mediaset, but, weeks later, the court denied the request “among other reasons because there was no necessary urgency,” says León. The expert believes that, despite “how excessive and even morbid” the media coverage surrounding this case may be, he has hardly seen any television moments that could be the subject of a complaint. Although he does believe that a specific content “could have a legal impact.” It is a video with the reconstruction of the alleged murder that includes the two existing versions, that of the prosecution and that of the defense. Telecinco broadcast the recording this weekend in the evening program Partyproduced by Unicorn Content, the company of which Ana Rosa Quintana is president and majority shareholder. According to León’s particular professional criteria, “this broadcast exceeds the limits of freedom of information,” he says.
The lawyer considers it “complicated” to determine whether the content violates Sancho’s dignity. “We would have to look at the case study,” he explains, although he is struck by the fact that those responsible for this audiovisual piece “have shown special effort in finding actors who resemble those involved instead of using other types of more generic visual resources, which leave less room for mistakes on the part of the viewer,” as occurs in other television programs that cover news about events. “It is not necessary to use actors to communicate the content, or for the public to understand the information surrounding the written report of the prosecution or the defense,” he believes. In addition, he continues, “this broadcast could also be harmful and painful for the victim’s family.”
“We are used to the audiovisual industry recapitulating in various formats, documentaries and even fiction series,” says León. “But it usually happens after a trial has been held. This has been the case with the crime of the Guardia Urbana and with the Asunta case. But, in this case, this type of reconstruction and content is being broadcast on the fly, with the trial barely begun,” the lawyer points out. Therefore, “the risk of this recreation broadcast on Telecinco is that it shows two biased versions, two legal realities that for the moment are not proven facts, which can be easily shared on social networks or other media, edited and taken out of context,” the lawyer points out.
Even if Sancho and Arrieta’s relatives had received financial compensation for their television appearances and, therefore, participated in and profited from the media coverage of the case, the spokesperson for Vilches Abogados believes that it would not harm them from a legal point of view if, in the future, one of the two parties decided to take legal action for some of the content offered by the media.
In Rodolfo Sancho’s statements to HBO Max in the first episode of a non-fiction series produced by Cuarzo Producciones (Banijay Iberia), the actor mentions various crimes attributed to Edwin Arrieta, such as death threats against his son and his family and an attempted sexual assault. But Daniel Sancho’s father “does not formulate it as an accusation, but rather echoes the words that his son has conveyed to him,” says León, who sees it as difficult to attribute a possible crime of slander in that interview.
Media self-regulation
The trial for the Sancho case is taking place in Thailand, “but let us remember what happened to Dolores Vázquez,” he points out. Hugo Aznara doctor in Philosophy and professor of Communication Ethics at the CEU Cardenal Herrera University in Valencia. The distorted overexposure of her image in the media contaminated a popular jury, which ended up convicting her of a murder she had not committed. “It is a clear example of how the media can implicitly establish guilt and innocence,” Aznar said in a telephone conversation on Tuesday. “These are trials that, by their very dynamic, unleash all kinds of passions, as happened with Vázquez in the case of Rocío Wanninkhof, with the murder of Diana Quer and the crime in Alcàsser.”
For Aznar, self-regulation of the media in this type of coverage mainly involves “respecting the presumption of innocence, which is fundamental, as well as respect for privacy, especially of family members,” he says, while recalling that “in the Arny case, the media that rewarded the sources encouraged slander.”
In recent years, Mediaset España has been ordered to pay various public figures compensation ranging from €50,000 (to the writer Lucía Etxebarría, for intrusion into privacy) to €220,000 (to one of Jesulín de Ubrique’s daughters, Julia Janeiro, for unlawful interference with her honour). The range is so wide because, unlike other situations, such as a traffic accident, where there is a report of physical injuries, the damage in this type of crime is psychological “and, therefore, more abstract and subject to interpretation”, points out Gonzalo León, from Vilches Abogados.
Deterrent effects
Since sanctions can only be established by a legal body, Hugo Aznar believes that “raising the amount of the penalties would help to have a deterrent effect.” In some cases, it has been the audience and not the media that has regulated the coverage of this type of information. This was the case of The Ferris Wheelin 2011. Mediaset was forced to cancel one of its most successful programmes, presented by Jordi González. It featured an interview with the mother of El Cuco, one of those involved in the death of Marta del Castillo. A campaign launched on the Internet managed to get advertisers to withdraw advertising from the programme. But, as Aznar recalls, the judge initially charged Pablo Herreros, the writer of the blog that promoted the boycott, with a possible crime of threats and coercion. “It is a clear case in which the judge put the company’s right to obtain an economic benefit first,” recalls the expert.
Aznar is one of the 13 members of the Commission for Arbitration, Complaints and Ethics of Journalismof the Federation of Associations of Journalists of Spain (FAPE). This commission is an ethical body of the journalistic profession based on self-regulation. It deals with complaints for possible violation of compliance with the Deontological Code of the professional association. Therefore, it acts as a moral authority granted by the press associations and the journalists affiliated to them and has no sanctioning capacity. In addition, if during the processing of a deontological file, the issue in question were to be brought to court, the processing would be suspended pending the judicial resolution, the organization explains.
One of the advantages of these complaints “is that they are free and, therefore, they equalize all people regardless of their economic resources,” says Aznar. But the doctor in Philosophy would like this self-regulatory body “to be better known”, so that more people would turn to it, and that it would have more media weight, “because these resolutions sting the serious media and they try to avoid them.”
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