Juan Francisco Trigatti, 49, has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for the sexual abuse of five kindergarten students while he was in charge of them in the Yapeyú neighborhood of Santa Fe.
The sentence was upheld by judges Fabio Mudry, Fernando Gentile Bersano, and Bruno Netri after the man had been acquitted in an oral and public trial held last year.
Earlier this year, he received a conviction from the Appeals Court, but the defense attorneys appealed that second ruling, leading to a horizontal appeals hearing where prosecutor Matías Broggi and prosecutor Jorgelina Moser Ferro requested the 12-year prison sentence be upheld, while the complainant's lawyer, Carolina Walker, also participated and made the same request as the MPA (Public Prosecutor's Office).
Broggi and Moser Ferro recalled that “the perpetrator committed the offenses during physical education classes he taught at a kindergarten in 2021.” As they specified, “he violated the sexual integrity of five girls who belonged to different shifts and groups at the educational institution.”
“Trigatti took advantage of his position of authority and proposed games that allowed him to get physically close to his students and carry out the abuses,” they added, for which he is now convicted as the author of a seriously outrageous act repeated four times, as well as in simple harm to the fifth victim.
The prosecutors emphasized: “This second panel of appellate judges confirmed what we have maintained from the beginning from the MPA regarding the criminal liability of Trigatti as the author of sexual abuse against girls who were his students.”
“With this ruling, the position of the first Appeals Court is reaffirmed in relation to the shortcomings in the evaluation of the evidence by the court that intervened in the oral trial,” the officials insisted.
Therefore, they stated that “in the first instance, there was a fragmented interpretation of the elements that accredit the criminal attribution,” and explained that “they had been analyzed in isolation and based on different criteria.”
As indicated on the website of the Santa Fe Public Prosecutor's Office, Judge Mudry shared the criticism of the “methods applied by the trial court to evaluate the testimonies” and considered it “misaligned with the conventional legal framework, as it reproduces and is based on inadmissible stereotypes and not on objective evidence.”
“The criminal investigation began with complaints filed by the victims' families after they managed to speak about ordeals,” recalled the representatives of the prosecutor's office, while the defendant in the crimes was charged with aggravating circumstances for having been committed by a person in charge of the education of minors.
