Maddie Case Files forum
19 March 2011
(used with permission):
Post subject: Re: Daily news, blogs & site news VI
Posted: Sat Mar 19, 2011
Ines wrote:
Just for the sake of clarity - what was it that Amaral stated that was false? Maybe I'm totally wrong but I seem to remember that it was his saying that LC fell down the stairs and that is how she sustained her injuries. However he wasn't actually there at the time. Is that right, anyone remember?
Post subject: Re: Daily news, blogs & site news VI
Posted: Sat Mar 19, 2011
beachy wrote:
Ines, I'm going on memory here, so bear with me.
The book La Estrela de Joana by Paulo Pereira Cristovao says that Leonor's injuries occurred in this manner: He had just finished questioning her, finally got tired of her sh*te, and lowered the boom on her about what she and Joao had done to Joana. She started crying hysterically and begging for forgiveness from a picture of Joana which he had placed on the wall.
Cristovao did not have her sign a statement. He left her in the custody of Paulo Marques Bom, another one of the PJ inspectors who had come down from Lisbon with him, and was sitting in an office writing up his report about what had happened that night when he heard shouting and screaming coming from the hallway.
He ran out the door of the office, and on the stairway he saw Antonio Cardoso and Marques Bom restraining Leonor. Marques Bom told him that Leonor had said she needed to go to the ladies' room and he had let her go alone, there being no way she could get out of the building from there. Leonor ran out of the bathroom screaming and tried to throw herself OVER (not down - a very important distinction in this case) the banister to the staircase. If she had succeeded, this would have done her a substantial damage, as they were on the second floor, and looking over the banister, Cristovao saw that there was also a basement floor below the first, so if Leonor had succeeded it would have been a three-story fall.
Apparently Cardoso and Marques Bom got to her just in time as she banged herself into the banister of the stairwell full tilt, which would have been sufficient to cause the bruising on her body, I am sure. She was fighting them, and they had to wrestle her down.
Look at the pictures of Leonor's bruised face. That is not the face of someone who has been beaten about the face as she contends. People who have sustained a vicious beating to the face have substantial bruising to the cheekbones, broken noses, split and swollen lips, etc. Leonor has no bruises below the top of her cheekbones. That is the face of someone who smashed into something (possibly the shoulder of a taller man who was trying to restrain her), getting two very black eyes in the process.
At the time Leonor did her little number, the people with her on the 2nd floor of the PJ office in Faro were Cardoso, Cristovao, and Marques Bom. Amaral and Leonel Morgado Marques, another of the PJ inspectors from Lisbon, were elsewhere in the building and came running when they also heard the shouting but did not get there as quickly as Cristovao and arrived after Leonor was already subdued.
Cardoso, Cristovao, Marques Bom, and Leonel Marques were charged with beating Leonor. All were acquitted of the beating. Cardoso, who wrote up the report of the incident, was charged with making a false statement. Amaral, who was questioned before anyone had been charged, was accused of making a false statement by saying that, to his knowledge, no one had "aggressed" Leonor.
This verdict is whack. The court at Evora specifically stated that it did not believe Leonor was telling the truth and called for the PJ to investigate her for perjury for testimony she gave during the trial (wonder how that came out), at the same time acquitting those who were charged with beating her, but convicting Cardoso and Amaral for making a written report and a statement, respectively, saying that no beating occurred. So if Leonor was beaten, who did it? It was very late at night. The PJ regional office at Faro isn't like a local police station, where people work in shifts. It's like an FBI field office, where everyone except a duty agent or two leaves for the day before 6.00.
This is what is referred to in America as a "compromise verdict," and I hate the son-of-a-b*tching things. The court decided that SOMETHING must have happened to Leonor, given all those bruises, but they couldn't prove that anyone had laid a finger on her. So in the absence of evidence to convict anyone of beating her up, let's just convict the people who made the statements of record of lying about what happened.
Interesting that Aragao now intends to go to the UN with this. That's all that's left to him. He complained to the European Court of Human Rights on Leonor's behalf years ago and got nowhere.
Also see:
A Estrela de Joana
Paulo Pereira Cristóvão
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