The Supreme Court has upheld the conviction against lawyer Jaime Andrés Alba Nortes for threatening federal prosecutor Dante Vega, who investigated the case against former Mendoza judge Walter Bento. Justices Horacio Rosatti, Carlos Rosenkrantz, and Ricardo Lorenzetti dismissed the appeal as inadmissible, leaving the sentence final. The lawyer was sentenced to six months of suspended prison time for threatening the prosecutor who drove the investigation against Bento. The threats case arose during the corruption trial against former Mendoza federal judge Walter Bento. In that process, police informant Enzo Diego Stuto testified that the lawyer had told him he had “bought a 308 rifle to have prosecutor Dante Vega killed.” Based on that testimony, proceedings were separated, and a parallel docket was opened, incorporating recordings of conversations between the informant and the lawyer from April to May 2021. In those dialogues, Alba Nortes stated: “I’m telling you this between us, I’ll have Vega killed” and also mentioned he had bought a rifle “so they kill him,” as documented in the case. The investigation was handled by Federal Court No. 3 of Mendoza, whose acting judge, Susana Pravata, deemed the threats proven and sentenced him to six months of suspended prison time, while the lawyer was already under house arrest. During his interrogation, the defendant claimed it was “a comment in a private conversation” and that he knew his interlocutor was a police informant, an argument rejected by the magistrate. The defense appealed the decision, but the I Chamber of the Federal Court of Criminal Cassation confirmed the conviction, according to judicial sources from Agencia Noticias Argentinas. Ultimately, the case reached the Supreme Court through a complaint.
