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The decision of the Supreme Court of Justice to ratify the sentence of eight years in prison to a traffic policeman for receiving $ 50,000 in bribes once again opened the eternal debate on the disproportionality of penalties in Colombia.
In the process, it was established that, in 2012, the patrolman would receive $ 100,000 to expedite the inspection of a bus that was immobilized after an accident. The key test in the process was the driver’s word.
The policeman, who is out of the country, is now a fugitive from justice.
“When it comes to crimes against public administration, the amount ends up being really inconsequential. One peso or one billion pesos end up being the same, in terms of what is the reproach of what is done to the public servant who demands or to the particular that offers a certain sum of money, because what the norm protects is public morality ”, explains the criminal lawyer Rodrigo Parada.
For experts, there is an obvious disproportion between this case, where an abuse of office is punished, compared to the already known corruption scandals that compromise high public officials, such as the so-called toga poster, where magistrates received bribes in exchange for benefiting people in their processes, or that of Odebrecht, where bribes reached 100 million dollars.
However, they state that there is a justification for the police to have more sentence than the protagonists of the other scandals.
This is how Andrés Felipe Caballero, criminal lawyer, explains: “in those large-scale corruption scandals, where infinitely higher amounts are involved, in general, the defendants enter into pre-agreements with the Prosecutor’s Office or obtain principles of opportunity and this then makes it possible to understand the problem from the award justice ”.
The Traffic Police always claimed his innocence saying that it was a trap to incriminate him as a revenge against the institution for having immobilized the bus.
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