Expert Report on the Trial of the Bilbao Provincial Court

Until 2023, the cuts in the trial record were a party's complaint corroborated by a witness (A.18, A.20, A.21, A.22). This document turns them into the object of an expert conclusion.

The report

• Date of issue: 19 July 2023.
• Author: Antonio Miguel Rodríguez Castillo, court-appointed expert in forensic criminalistics, member no. 111.
• Reference: case 1.RPA 00000080/2017 — the procedural roll of the Provincial Court of Bizkaia.
• Object: the audiovisual material of the trial, compared against the original media of the ARCONTE system (A.39.3).

The conclusions

• The audiovisual material was repeatedly altered.
• The alterations present a constant orientation: to distort the facts to the accused's detriment.
• The incidents documented in A.18, A.21 and A.22 obtain, with this report, independent technical confirmation.

The map of the incidents (31-1-2019, the system's own marks)

→ ~10:09 — "opening" of the session: 11 minutes beforehand with no record; the accused already appears inside the room (A.18) → ~10:29 — cut of almost 6 minutes coinciding with the attributed protest the audio does not capture (A.21) → ~12:09 — the order is recorded: "no, no, do not record the conduct of the taking of evidence" (A.22) → (sessions of January–February) — stretches of the taking of evidence absent from the delivered material against the originals (A.39.3) The expert report examines these incidents as a whole and concludes repeated alteration, with a constant orientation.

The property that makes it incontestable

The expert examination is reproducible: the original files, their electronic signatures (.p7b) and their metadata remain available (A.39.3). Any expert appointed by any body — Spanish or European — can repeat the examination and confirm or refute the conclusions. In ten years of proceedings, there is no record that any body has ordered it.

What this report activated

It was the central new fact of the review application before the Supreme Court (A.36) — the situation contemplated by Article 954 of the Criminal Procedure Act — and of the complaints before the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (A.34). The responses it received appear in A.35, A.37 and A.38.

How to verify it

Read the report's conclusions; then commission — or demand — the counter-expert report on the originals of A.39.3. The permanent availability of the material turns each day without a counter-expert report into one more datum.