Are you being tried for drug trafficking? Has the use of narcolanchas worsened your sentence? At A&O Abogados we guide you in your procedure.
The narcolanchas were declared prohibited vessels by Royal Decree-Law 16/2018, of October 26, which adopts certain measures to combat the illicit trafficking of people and merchandise in relation to the vessels used.
By virtue of this Royal Decree, those that are more than eight meters in length or that, having less, have a maximum power, regardless of the number of engines, equal to or greater than 150 kilowatts, are not within the permitted traffic.
Thus, the justification for the rule lies in the use given to this type of vessel. But it is clear that this type of vessel, when used, is a means for committing a crime. Its use then within the type. Should it be considered a real or medial contest of crimes?
If we consider that there is a real concurrence of crimes, we would be talking, firstly, of the criminal offense that involves the mere possession of the boat and that is connected with smuggling and, on the other hand, the commission of the illegal drug trafficking.
The medial contest, on the other hand, would not penalize two different crimes, but would apply an aggravated penalty to the more serious of the two, drug trafficking, for considering the use of the narcolancha as a means to achieve an end.
The Supreme Court in its judgment 906/2021, which is related precisely to this distinction, does not accept the medial contest, since it considers that “There is no room, therefore, for the alleged contest of rules or absorption of contraband in drug trafficking, because The latter does not entail assuming or gathering the totality of the unfairness of the proven fact and the devaluation of the action deployed in the modus operandi with the use of the mechanisms used to transport the drug and the existence of the vessel established as such in the RDL. 16/2018 in relation to Law 12/1995 on smuggling activities and its characteristics. If so, the content of RDL 16/2018 would be distorted in cases of the existence of a crime of drug trafficking, when the circumstances provided for in RDL 16/2018 occur.
Thus, therefore, two different crimes would be punished with the punitive consequences that this entails.
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