The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has condemned the Spanish Justice system to pay 32,000 euro to the mother of a girl who died in 2013, as a result of a failure in an artificial respirator following a traffic incident.
The Strasbourg Court has agreed with María Isabel Garrido Herrero, who denounced the Spanish Justice for not properly investigating the causes of the death of her daughter Marina. The minor was left quadriplegic in a traffic incident three years earlier and she was connected to an assisted breathing system, which failed and caused her to go into a coma.
In the opinion of the European judges, they state that the five-year investigation was abandoned in 2019 when the term granted for the determination of the reasons that caused the death of the minor was exceeded, once the time to determine criminal responsibility expired.
The mother of the deceased girl went to the European Justice to claim 100,000 euro and denounce that the Spanish courts had not sufficiently investigated the causes of the death of her daughter, who suffered irreversible injuries due to the mechanical failure.
After the traffic incident, the girl needed to be connected to a respirator, first in the hospital and then at home. When the failure of the machine occurred, the girl was left in a coma, brain dead, a state in which she remained until her last day.
Now, the ECHR considers that the criminal investigation was “excessively long” and says that, instead of making a global assessment, the Spanish courts addressed the facts in a “rather passive” manner, simply admitting some of the evidence requested by the applicant to find out who had installed the machine, without making an effort to establish the cause of death.
The trial court filed the proceedings three times, and during the five years of investigation there was a “significant delay” in analysing the evidence.
“The domestic system as a whole, when faced with a contentious case of medical negligence that resulted in the death of the plaintiff’s daughter, did not provide an adequate, effective and timely response in accordance with the State’s obligation,” it concludes.
The girl was forcibly discharged from hospital on January 16, 2013 based on a judicial order supported by the hospital’s bioethics committee, which indicated that the situation was “irreversible”.
However, the mother, a doctor by profession, disagreed with the diagnosis considering that her daughter could experience a marked improvement, so she decided to file a complaint with the Guardia Civil, since the little girl was not “stabilised” during her transfer, which was “a great risk to her life.”
