Sancho case: a global legal challenge
At six o’clock in the morning on Thursday, August 29, 2024, the sentence became effective. Daniel Sancho is sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of the Colombian surgeon Edwin Arrieta in Thailand. The court considers him guilty of the three crimes for which he has been charged: premeditated murder, dismemberment and concealment of the victim’s body, and destruction of other people’s documents, specifically the victim’s passport. “It was the sentence we were looking for so that the crime would not go unpunished” assures Juan Gonzalo Ospina, founding partner of Ospina Abogados and lawyer representing the Arrieta family.
On the other hand, also as part of the sentence, the defendant is sentenced to pay a compensation of 4 million bat, equivalent to about 107,000 euros, to the victim’s family. Gonzalo Ospina’s firm made an expert appraisal of the damage caused to Edwin Arrieta’s family, which quantified the damage at 30 million bats (793,000 euros).
by julia gil
LEGAL CHALLENGES
One of the most shocking cases of recent times, both because of the media involvement and the high international complexity, which has resulted in a long judicial process that has not yet ended. Juango Ospina himself, as he is known by the Spanish legal sector, has confessed that they had never handled a case with so much media expectation. The main challenge was to ensure that the story that the public opinion showed was not far from the facts, as Ospina explains: “Playing against a contaminated part
of the public opinion has been complicated”. But this has not been the only challenge faced by the
Ospina Abogados team. Explaining to the Arrieta family the limits of the procedure was a delicate task, aggravated by language and cultural barriers that required an accurate translation of the documents. The team made several visits to Thailand to ensure that the judicial process was carried out correctly and in accordance with the law. One of the particularities of this case, in turn, is that it involved three different jurisdictions – Colombia, Spain and Thailand and, therefore, three legal systems with disparate legal cultures. For this reason, Ospina emphasizes that this procedure marked a before and after in his career. With a solid background in international criminal law, he describes it as “the perfect groundwork for Edwin Arrieta’s family to count on us to defend their interests”.
THAILAND REPRESENTATION STRATEGY
