On the other hand it could have allowed the authorities to gather enough evidence;
to dismiss once and for all any doubts that may subsist concerning the innocence of the missing [child's] parents.
http://www.mccannpjfiles.co.uk/PJ/LEGAL_SUMMARY.htm
Short term gain, long term loss in my opinion. The doubts weren't dismissed, so the archiving dispatch didn't 'clear' them as they claimed in the libel trial.
I'm trying to work out the subtleties between 277/1 and 277/2. I've tried to rephrase it slightly, with a bit of help from linguee to see if it's any clearer (assuming that I haven't distorted the meaning of the original in the process):
/1 The Public Ministry shall order the archival of the investigation as soon as there is sufficient evidence that no crime has been determined and that the arguido has not committed one in any way/ capacity (?), or... (irrelevant bla)
/2 The investigation shall also be archived if the Public Ministry has not been able to obtain sufficient indications that a crime has been committed or concerning the identity of its perpetrators.
IFF that's accurate, to me that would mean that upon weighing up the totality (which would have included the knuckle-rapping bit about the reconstruction), the prosecutors consciously opted for No. 1 - as all the available evidence had been examined, the investigation was conducted "with an enormous margin of error" and they were still no wiser as to what happened to her.
A key bit for me is this re the determination of a crime:
- Despite all of this, it was not possible to obtain any piece of evidence that would allow for a medium man, under the light of the criteria of logics, of normality and of the general rules of experience, to formulate any lucid, sensate, serious and honest conclusion about the circumstances under which the child was removed from the apartment (whether dead or alive, whether killed in a neglectful homicide or an intended homicide, whether the victim of a targeted abduction or an opportunistic abduction), nor even to produce a consistent prognosis about her destiny and inclusively - the most dramatic - to establish whether she is still alive or if she is dead, as seems more likely.
There was no evidence that the arguidos had committed a crime, as at the end of the day there was still no clue as to what type of crime.
For some reason, the SC latched onto the fact that the T7 + Jez declined the reconstruction to clarifiy x details and thus 'denied' their arguido friends the "possibility of proving their innocence".
(I doubt that the prosecutors hadn't read the correspondence as to why they weren't nuts about the prospect of another mediafest, plus quite possibly that the details that Rebelo wanted to check were somewhat unlikely to prove anything one way or another, anyway.) The SC wasn't concerned with how useful it may or may not have been in public - they seem to have just seen that phrase, IMO.
If that's the case, then I think they were wrong to have changed the legal provision under which the investigation got shelved.
