Former mayor sentenced over child porn case
Luis Serna, mayor of Calpe in 2007 and 2008, will serve seven years
LUIS SERNA, the former mayor of Calpe between 2007 and 2008, has been sentenced to seven years in prison for distributing child pornography. In addition, the court imposed another penalty of special disqualification for 10 years from any profession or trade, whether paid or not, which involves regular and direct contact with minors . The public prosecutor's office had requested eight years in prison.
Serna, who is a family doctor by profession but is no longer practicing, kept his trial for possessing and distributing material containing minors hidden, and continued to teach drawing at the Casa de Cultura in Calpe. After learning that he had been charged with the offences, he resigned. He was also suspended from his membership of the political party Calpe PSPV.
The sentence, which is not final as Serna has appealed, was issued just before the state of alarm was announced. The court identified Serna as “the IP user who acted from the town of Calpe downloading and sharing files with scenes of a sexual nature in which minors had been used through peer to peer networks”.
The judgment rejected the nullity of the case raised by Serna’s defence, and confirmed the discovery on his hard drives of 'thousands of image and video files in which minors or adolescents appear having sexual relations both among themselves and with adults'. Some of the statements from the court have been omitted as they were too disturbing and graphic to publish.
Serna 'arranged the files with child pornography in an intentional, orderly and structured way, differentiating the pornographic material according to the subject, age and origin of the minors,' said the three magistrates.
Serna acknowledged that the files were his at the trial, but denied their distribution. He promised the magistrates that he would initiate the therapy or treatment required to correct his misconduct. According to the court, when the Guardia Civil raided his home in February 2018 and discovered the files, Serna stated he 'did it like everyone else'.
“From all this evidence, and in relation to the rest of the evidence documented in the proceedings, this court fully believes that the accused downloaded child pornography files, and is also perfectly aware that due to its location in the file from the Emule programme, he shared them with the rest of the users of said programme. These were not accidental accesses, but rather purposeful searches, as evidenced by searches with unequivocally paedophile terms and the defendant's computer knowledge is proved by the fact that he had a TOR scanner installed on his computer to be able to access the Deep Web internet so that his IP address was hidden', the judge concluded.
Luis Serna was mayor of Calpe from June 2007 to October 2008, the date on which a motion of censure agreed between the bloc, the PP and the PSD removed him from the mayor's office. In the 2011 elections, he ran again as a Socialist candidate but lost to César Sánchez. The downloads began in 2014, a date when he was no longer mayor, but a spokesman for the PSPV.
Serna was arrested in 2018 after a court ordered a search of his home in Calpe. According to the prosecutor, agents found an abundant amount of pornographic material stored on various devices.
His date for appeal has yet to be announced.