52
final and, instead, is designed to cure any judicial errors that may have been committed regarding
aspects that were not addressed during the ordinary appeals process.
204. Having made the foregoing distinction, the Commission notes that the Inter-American
Court already issued a ruling in the case of Herrera Ulloa v. Costa Rica on the writ of reversal on
cassation at the time when most of the alleged victims in the instant case were convicted. The Court
found that the writ of cassation at that time did not fulfill the requirement of a broad remedy because it
imposed a priori restrictions that did not enable a comprehensive examination of the issues discussed
and analyzed before the lower court.335
205. Hence, the Commission deems it relevant to address Articles 443, 369 and 445 of the
Code of Criminal Procedure, which regulate the scope of and formal procedural requirements to file for
writ of cassation. Based on an analysis at Article 443 of said Code, it is apparent that the writ of
cassation is only admissible “when the decision failed to observe or erroneously applied a legal precept,”
in other words, it was limited to review of potential errors of law, to the exclusion of issues pertaining to
the determination of the facts by the lower court, or the assessment of the evidence of that lower court.
This restriction can be clearly deduced from the fact that Article 369 of said Code sets forth a closeended list of grounds under which a writ of cassation could be admissible, which focus on the essential
elements constituting a judgment or, as was noted above, potential errors exclusively of law.
Additionally, Article 445 of the aforementioned Code requires the appellant at the time of filing the
petition for the writ, to lay out in detail the exact provisions of the law that were considered “not
observed or erroneously applied.” To not meet that requirement rendered the remedy inadmissible.
206. In this regard, the Commission finds that the writ of cassation, in light of the
aforementioned legal provisions, was not effective or accessible to achieve the aim of ensuring the right
to appeal the judgment inasmuch as its admissibility was limited a priori to particular grounds pertaining
to the application of the norm, to the exclusion of factual and evidentiary issues.
207. In view of the fact that the source of the restriction is the text itself of the applicable
statute, the Commission finds it unnecessary to delve deeper into the specific allegations raised by the
alleged victims in their petitions for reversal on cassation, or into the response to said allegations
received by them. As a consequence of the statute itself, which automatically ruled out any arguments
that were not confined to errors of law, it is entirely feasible that the victims’ defense, in seeking to get
the petition to be admitted and decided, did not necessarily request review of issues of fact or
assessment of evidence, but instead made arguments considered by them to perhaps have chance of
being successfully admitted. Moreover, the terms of the statute excluded a priori a review of a
comprehensive scope and, therefore, it did not provide for the remedy as set forth in Article 8.2.h of the
Convention. Consequently, the persons named above did not have access to this due process safeguard
mechanism.
208. In this respect, it is enough to determine that the alleged victims embarked on the
appeals procedure under legal constraints as to what allegations they were able to make. As was noted
above, at the time of the events of the petitions, an automatic exclusion of issues of fact or of evidence
appraisal was in effect, thus doing away with any examination of the importance or nature of said issues
335
IA Ct of HR, Case of Herrera Ulloa v. Costa Rica. Judgment of Preliminary Objections, Merits, Reparations and Costs.
July 2, 2004, Series C No. 107, para. 167.