THE TWIN ORDERS: GRANT AND DISMISS, WITH NO NEW FACT

While the conviction was being delivered in Bilbao, something the textbooks do not contemplate was happening in Alicante. The Provincial Court, on the same appeal, on the same subject, issued two orders of opposite sign within seventy-one days: on 21 March 2019, to grant; on 31 May 2019, to dismiss (A.47; the texts, in the file, DOC-0096).

Between the two dates there is no new fact, no supervening evidence, no different submission on record. What changed is not in the file. The appeal was the same; the court, the same; the result, the opposite.

The law assumes that courts can make mistakes, and that is why appeals exist. What the law does not assume is reversibility without cause: a judicial decision that transforms into its opposite without anything having changed is not an error — it is the demonstration that the result did not depend on the file.

For Apolozan, this episode had a bitter evidentiary value: it showed him, with an official stamp, that the problem was not the quality of his arguments. The same argument was valid and invalid, depending on the day. When that is documented in two consecutive orders, the question ceases to be legal and becomes the one that has headed this Story since the first milestone: what needed to happen — and for whom?