Amadeu Casellas set free

From Klinamen via VilaWeb via This is Our Job:

March 9, 2010

Amadeu Casellas walked out of Girona prison this afternoon after 24 years behind bars.

Justice Department sources revealed that a 2008 Constitutional Court decision, in which it was ruled that time served in preventive detention should count toward a prisoner’s final sentence, has finally been applied to Casellas’ case. After a sentence recalculation based on statutory discrepancies between the old and new penal codes, authorities concluded that Casellas had already served eight years too many, and released him today—some six years ahead of his scheduled 2016 release date.

Sources close to Casellas explained that his defense had long been petitioning for a sentence reduction that would correspond to the years he spent in preventive detention, but the Justice Department “always denied” that Casellas was serving any excess time.

While behind bars, Casellas engaged in three lengthy hunger strikes (including one just last year) in order to protest the “unfulfilled promises of Prison Services” and “poor condition of Catalan prisons.” In addition, he actively participated in a number of prison riots.

Casellas discovered anarchism at age 14, and was originally imprisoned in 1979. He was in the midst of serving several sentences for a series of bank robberies, the last of which he carried out in 2006 while on leave from prison. The money from the various robberies was used to finance labor and social struggles, with Casellas dividing the money among people and organizations that, in his own words, “needed it.” He eventually came to be known as “the Spanish Robin Hood.”

More information (in Spanish) here

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