15 are two judgments from the Administrative Law Court of Colombia’s Council of State, dating from 1993 and 1996 –i.e., predating the Commission’s application- that find the State responsible for the events that occurred with respect to five of the victims (supra, paragraphs 32 and 34). Although the events occurred on January 23, 1991, while the military criminal justice system’s inquiry was underway until early 1998, the State did not embark upon an investigation of the facts. It was at that point that an important change occurred, when the Human Rights Unit of the Office of the Prosecutor General of the Nation took over the criminal investigation. The Commission acknowledged this at the public hearing. The investigation required under the Convention cannot be identical to the one conducted in the present process; were that the case, the rule would be redundant and pointless. In the Court’s view, the prior investigation that the Commission argues is a prerequisite, has been carried out, thereby making this argument irrelevant in the present case. 43. c) Hernán Lizcano Jacanamejoy’s death is the only one in this episode that was not the subject of a criminal case prosecuted in the Colombian courts. The Office of the Prosecutor General of the Nation concluded that the person in question had died in a clash with the police. It based its conclusion on the pretrial statements made by Captain Antonio Alonso Martínez, lieutenants Jaime Alberto Peña Casas and Rafael Ordóñez Merjech and police officers Elías Sandoval Reyes and Wilson Botina Papamija, on the deposition of former police officer Pablo Lugo Herrera, the depositions of campesinos Clodomiro Burgos Acosta and Leonardo Alvarado, and on the testimony of Isidoro Cuarán Muchavisoy and a sister of the victim, María Córdula Mora Jacanamejoy. This was the testimony of Mr. Pedro Elías Díaz Romero at the public hearing, who was coordinator of the Human Rights Unit at the Prosecutor General’s Office. The Inter-American Commission, on the other hand, contends that Colombian forces executed Hernán Lizcano Jacanamejoy. It attempted to challenge the evidence produced by the State by arguing that the testimony of the police officers who participated in the operation was not credible. It also asserted that State authorities had failed to collect shells and bullets at the site where Lizcano Jacanamejoy was killed, that the scrapings had not been taken from the victim’s hands to determine whether he had fired a weapon, and that other important procedures had been neglected. As it states in various passages of its final arguments, the evidence most central to the Commission’s case were the expert tests conducted: As already pointed out, both the forensic report and the ballistics tests produce incontrovertible proof that Hernán Lizcano Jacanamejoy did not die in an armed confrontation. To the contrary, the victim was completely defenseless when executed, and was thus executed arbitrarily while in the custody of the State. […] The trajectory of the bullets established by the experts and the fact that Hernán Lizcano was kneeling at the time of his death, precludes any possibility that Hernán Lizcano died as the State alleged, i.e., in an armed confrontation. The Commission considers that the expert tests unequivocally show that Hernán Lizcano did not die in a clash with agents of the National Police. Instead, he, like the other six victims, was executed while completely defenseless. […]