Twenty-year-old Ricardo Pacheco smashed his 19-year-old girlfriend’s head with a stone, “suffocated” her and then hit her over the head with a spade when he thought he heard her groan. Sentencing him to 20 years and six months for the crime, Maria Manuel Miranda, the presiding judge at the court in Santa Tirso, said Pacheco had shown “no emotion, nor even the minimum of regret”. Now the Supreme court has overturned this sentence, reducing the time Pacheco should serve by almost eight years.
Setting his new prison term at 12 years and three months, the court’s reasoning was based on the fact that Pacheco had not “pre-meditated the crime”.
Considering that prison terms are usually ‘reduced’ naturally by half, and Pacheco has already served two years behind bars, he could be out of jail sometime in 2019.
