Download file 36 KB Texto completo en español More of:  Corte Suprema de Chile

These pages reproduce the Supreme Court ruling of July 1, 2002, in which the highest court in the land considers that General Augusto Pinochet is suffering from an incurable mental illness. Accordingly it applies definitive closure in his favor in the process against him for the events surrounding the military commission led by General Sergio Arellano Stark in October 1973. Through this ruling, the criminal division of the Supreme Court revoked the temporary stay issued by the Santiago Appeals Court on July 9, 2001, which had left open the possibility of reopening the preceding should the former president recover.
Pinochet had his parliamentary immunity lifted in August 2000, and a few months later was prosecuted by Judge Juan Guzmán as the author of 57 homicides and 18 kidnappings in the case of the military commission led by General Arellano Stark. Subsequently, in a resolution dated March 8, 2001, the Santiago Court of Appeals downgraded the offense from "authorship" to "concealment", and on July 9 that year voted by two votes to 1 in favor of temporary stay of proceedings for General Pinochet on health grounds. The texts of these three rulings, the first from the Supreme Court and the other two from the Santiago Court of Appeals, were reproduced in Estudios Públicos Nos. 79 (winter 2000), 82 (autumn 2001) and 83 (winter 2001), respectively.