The judges of the Patras Mixed Jury Court of Appeal could not believe their ears with what they heard in a case of child seduction that was being tried yesterday at the courthouse.
The accused was a middle-aged businessman from Zakynthos, who hosted a family of Bulgarian Gypsies in his house for rent and ended up having a partnership with them, baptizing their daughter.
Years later and after they broke up, the businessman was reported by the daughter and her father to the police for molesting his then 13-year-old goddaughter in exchange for gifts.
In fact, on his mobile phone a number of semi-nude photos of the minor had been found, which the accused attributed to the intimacy between them created by their... spiritual relationship.
"What kind of relationship between spiritual father and goddaughter is this, sir? And why didn't you erase the photos?" the court president asked him in a stern tone. The accused excused himself saying that out of naivety he kept them on his phone, but he was not believed.
He was originally sentenced to 12 years imprisonment, but after a 16-month remand, he was given a suspended sentence until the trial in the Court of Appeal yesterday. He was found guilty again, as at first instance, on the recommendation of the prosecutor of the Court of Appeal, for the offence of indecency with a minor child under the age of 14, but was sentenced to just 5 years in prison, redeemable at 3 euros a day, and returned home, thanks to the softer penal code of the Syriza government, which changed indecency against minors from a felony to a misdemeanour.
Without a moral barrier
The defense of Theodoros Chronopoulos attributed the then underage girl's allegations against his client to her father's plan to blackmail the best man for money when she came into friction with him and asked the family to leave the house he was renting them.
Furthermore, he tried to diminish the gravity of the allegations, stating that the family's background has no moral foundation. The father has been convicted of domestic violence and is an alcoholic, the mother is said to have had sexual relations with the best man, while the girl, now 18 years old, was an abandoned child of a broken family, with non-existent moral barriers, who drank and satisfied the perverse appetites of elderly people for a few euros.
He even cited the findings of a child psychologist who examined the 13-year-old during the interrogation phase and found a lack of objective judgment, requesting a psychiatric evaluation of both the parents and the child.
Source: pelop.gr
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