Ministerio Fiscal

Ministerio Fiscal is the prosecuting authority in the case against Alice Espanet, representing the argument that she should be held criminally responsible for the deaths of her twins. Its role is shown through concrete procedural disputes and courtroom arguments: it opposed her release from custody, tested the psychiatric basis of the defense, and urged the jury not to treat motherhood or presumed mental illness as an automatic explanation for the crime.

Role in the Case

After Alice Espanet’s lawyer, Carmela Basaguren, argued that Article 20.1 of the Spanish Criminal Code could exempt a person from criminal responsibility when a psychological disorder prevented them from understanding the unlawfulness of an act or acting accordingly, Ministerio Fiscal pressed the opposing position. It objected to Alice’s release from pretrial detention, emphasizing the gravity of the allegations: two murders, aggravated by kinship, with a potential sentence of forty years. The judge nevertheless granted release on bail, subject to surrender of Alice’s passport and a requirement to report to court every fifteen days.

That early disagreement established the central legal divide. The defense presented mental disorder as grounds for exemption; the prosecution stressed the seriousness of the alleged acts and resisted allowing that claim to determine Alice’s status before trial. The account does not reduce this dispute to procedure alone: it forms part of the larger question of how criminal law should distinguish culpability from illness.

Psychiatric Evidence and Cross-Examination

At trial, the prosecution challenged the defense psychiatrist’s diagnosis of postpartum psychosis. The psychiatrist had relied on Alice’s behavior and her own account, while acknowledging that there was no official diagnosis documenting the condition. When the prosecutor put that basis to him directly, he confirmed it; most jurors appeared to accept the answer, to the prosecution’s disappointment.

Ministerio Fiscal then called two psychiatrists who had examined Alice at the investigating judge’s request soon after the deaths. They said they had found neither psychosis nor depression, and argued that postpartum psychosis usually arose in the weeks immediately after childbirth, not ten months later. To illustrate the timing they considered characteristic of confirmed cases, they described other infanticides. Carmela Basaguren objected that these examples did not address her client’s case. The experts then turned to Alice, citing the Beck Depression Inventory and the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale before reading a list of personality traits from their notes. Their formal, impersonal presentation weakened their standing with the jury; one expert’s unscripted conclusion—that the issue concerned Alice’s character rather than a disorder—became the testimony’s most pointed moment.

Closing Argument and the Meaning of Motherhood

In its closing argument, Ministerio Fiscal emphasized the twins’ names, Alex and Angela, and insisted on their individuality and need for care. The prosecutor rejected the assumption that a mother could not be cruel, arguing that this belief rested on outdated ideas about femininity. The argument also resisted treating cruelty as necessarily a consequence of mental illness: in the prosecution’s account, wrongdoing could not always be made reassuringly legible through social disadvantage or psychiatric imbalance.

The prosecutor developed that claim into an argument about maternal power. A mother might regard her children as her own creation and, through a distorted sense of authority, imagine that she had the right to destroy what she had made. The speech thus connected the specific allegations against Alice to a wider challenge to idealized assumptions about maternal goodness. It also stood in tension with the defense’s reliance on mental illness as a basis for exemption from responsibility.

Legal Context and Outcome

The book places this courtroom conflict against the changing legal treatment of infanticide. In Spain, infanticide was treated as distinct from homicide from 1822 until the 1995 Criminal Code abolished the separate offense; earlier provisions had tied a reduced penalty to a mother’s attempt to conceal dishonor, while later proposals referred instead to emotional strain associated with childbirth and the puerperium. The comparison clarifies the stakes of the prosecution’s position: whether a mother’s circumstances or mental state should alter how the law names and punishes the killing of a child. It does not establish that Ministerio Fiscal itself shaped those historical rules.

The jury ultimately accepted a defense based on mental illness, and the judge replaced imprisonment with outpatient psychiatric treatment rather than confinement in a psychiatric institution. The case therefore ended differently from the custodial penalty sought in the prosecution’s early account of the charges. In an interview about the result, the decision was described as a possible turning point in debate over mental illness and criminal punishment, while the choice of outpatient treatment was linked to Alice’s family support and the practical shortcomings of the penal system. The outcome leaves Ministerio Fiscal’s central challenge unresolved: how to hold a defendant accountable while deciding what weight to give psychiatric evidence and the circumstances surrounding motherhood.