High Court reduces jail sentence to two years and nine months for Scottish man arrested during Pablo Hasel imprisonment protests

Catalonia's High Court has reduced the five-year and one-month prison sentence to two years and nine months for William Aitken, a Scottish man who lives in Barcelona and was arrested during the Pablo Hasel imprisonment protests in February of 2021. 

The judges accepted the Scottish man's appeal for public disorder and crimes against police officers but found him guilty of hiding his true identity. 

The defendant's representative, Alerta Solidària, who is also part of a left-wing pro-independence legal defense team, said they will appeal this latest decision. 

One of the other crimes that have not been taken into consideration is Aitken's use of a skateboard as a dangerous object. 

"According to the ruling, which follows the narrative of the police officers who detained him, the defendant was kicking the floor with his skateboard to break rocks that he would then throw against police," Alerta Solidària wrote in a statement. 

The provincial court in Barcelona took sides with the testimony of the two police officers. The Scottish man was detained with around 30 other people on the second night of demonstrations. 

For the anti-repressive legal team, "the aggravating of the dangerous object should be in regard to the object that is attacked, and not based on the object that is being used to obtain the thing that would be thrown." The judge agreed with this position. 

However, Alerta Solidària has questioned other aspects of the ruling, such as the accusation that the detainee was identified for wearing a white sweatshirt when he was in fact wearing a colorful one, or that a wooden skateboard could be used to physically break concrete.

The 30-year-old UK citizen was in preventive prison for 37 nights because the United Kingdom is outside the European Union since Brexit. Therefore, Aitken was deemed a flight risk, but released in May of 2021.

The first sentence was one year and four months in prison for public disorder and three years and nine months for attacking authorities.