Former Brazilian soccer participant Dani Alves has had a rape conviction in opposition to him quashed upon attraction.
The highest courtroom in Spain’s Catalonia area mentioned it overturned the unique ruling in Alves’ case saying it had introduced “inconsistencies and contradictions”.
The previous Barcelona participant was discovered responsible of sexual assault in February final 12 months and was sentenced to 4 years and 6 months in jail. He denied wrongdoing throughout the three-day trial.
It was dominated that Alves raped the sufferer in a rest room at an upscale Barcelona nightclub early on New 12 months’s Eve in 2022.
On Friday, the highest courtroom in Catalonia dominated that there was “insufficient evidence” to rule out Alves’ presumption of innocence.
Within the judges’ ruling, they wrote that the testimony of the sufferer “differed notably” from proof of video footage taken earlier than the girl and Alves entered the lavatory the place she mentioned he pressured her to have intercourse with out her consent.
In March final 12 months, Alves paid €1m (then £930,000) in bail to be launched from jail whereas interesting the rape conviction.
The previous Barcelona footballer paid the sum and handed over his Brazilian and Spanish passports after prosecutors had argued he was a flight threat.
Alves, now 41, had earlier than that been saved in jail from January 2023 till March 2024.
He could now go away the nation because the attraction courtroom lifted all journey restrictions.
The choice can nonetheless be appealed earlier than Spain’s Supreme Courtroom.
The Alves trial was the primary high-profile case since Spain overhauled its legal guidelines in 2022 to make consent central to defining a intercourse crime in response to a rise in protests after a gang-rape case throughout the San Fermin bull-running competition in Pamplona in 2016.
The laws popularly often known as the “only yes means yes” regulation defines consent as an express expression of an individual’s will, making it clear that silence or passivity don’t equal consent.
