11 exacerbates his problems; he suffers from pain in his chest; he cannot breathe; half his face goes numb; he has palpitations, dizziness, sweating fits and the “feeling that one day he will be found dead in his cell.” The foregoing leads to the conclusion that Mr. Raxcacó Reyes suffers from post-traumatic stress, as a result of the prison conditions described above and of having been sentenced to death six years ago. f) Expert evidence of Alberto Martín Binder, Professor of Criminal Procedural Law in the Postgraduate Department of the Universidad de Buenos Aires and other Latin American universities, and co-author of the Guatemalan Code of Criminal Procedure Following ratification of the American Convention, Article 201 of the Guatemalan Penal Code has been modified several times: in 1994, by Legislative Decree No. 38/94; in 1995, by Legislative Decree No. 14/95 and, finally, on October 21, 1996, by Legislative Decree No. 81/96, which is currently in force. The common purpose of the modifications has been to increase the punishment for the crime of kidnapping or abduction and to introduce new scenarios for imposing the death penalty. When Guatemala ratified the American Convention, Article 201 regulated two categories of crime encompassing different facts: (a) kidnapping, and (b) death as a result of kidnapping, and the imposition of the death penalty was only established for the latter category. Decree No. 81/96 annulled the crime aggravated by the result and established the death penalty for all cases of kidnapping. Consequently, if, in 1978, the death penalty was only imposed when a death had occurred as a result of a kidnapping, as of 1996, the mere act of kidnapping authorized the application of the death penalty. Furthermore, the concept of perpetrator was expanded to include the ambiguous figure of the mastermind. Likewise, imprisonment was established, not as an alternative punishment, but as an adjustment to the constitutional prohibition to impose the death penalty on certain persons. While retaining the same juridical designation for the crime established in Article 201 of the Penal Code, the State included a wide range of cases and perpetrators for application of the death penalty. The reformed crime has a different factual basis, which, together with the expansion of the scope of the perpetrators, means that the punishment has been extended to new cases that were not previously included. The crime of kidnapping [as it appears in the Penal Code] currently in force in Guatemala is also incompatible with the provisions of the Convention, because it establishes the death penalty for cases in which the restrictive factor of “the most serious crimes” stipulated in Article 4(2) of the Convention is not respected. Lastly, it is incompatible because it states that imposition of the death penalty is of a mandatory nature, disregarding the personal circumstances of the person convicted. In addition, the State has not respected the provisions of Article 4(6) of the American Convention, which establishes the right of every person condemned to death to apply for amnesty, pardon, or commutation of sentence. The annulment of the norms that established this possibility, via Legislative Decree No. 32/2000, produced a legal vacuum in the domestic legal system that prevents commutation of the death sentence and its replacement by a prison sentence. B) ASSESSMENT OF THE EVIDENCE