The Tommouhi file: when the system gets it wrong, reparation cannot be another obstacle course
STS 2668/2026 says something simple and blunt: when the error is unequivocal, demanding another procedure to declare it turns procedure into a second conviction.
There are errors a judgment corrects and errors an entire life does not recover. Ahmed Tommouhi spent close to 18 years deprived of liberty for crimes he did not commit. The Spanish Supreme Court has now recognised compensation of 2.5 million euros and, in doing so, has said something the profession should underline: when a judicial error follows unequivocally from a review judgment, no further procedure is needed to declare it. As we report today in our news piece on STS 2668/2026, the Chamber thus refines the strict reading of article 293 of the Organic Law of the Judiciary.
Formalism as a second conviction
The declaratory procedure for judicial error was born with a reasonable function: preventing every losing party from turning defeat into a claim against the State. But applied without nuance to flagrant errors, it produced a grotesque result: the person to whom the system had already acknowledged - through the review of their conviction - that they had spent years in prison while innocent, had to start another lawsuit so that what the first resolution already said could be declared. More years of lawyers, of fees, of waiting. The procedure, conceived as a filter, operated as a second conviction.
The doctrine opened by the judgment is one of legal common sense: procedural economy and effective protection do not admit useless duplications. When the review says the convicted person did not commit the facts, the error is already declared by the very system that committed it.
What money does not repair
The 2.5 million is the figure the system puts on 18 years of lost liberty. Nobody would make that calculation in favour of the State: it is proof that criminal judicial error is the most expensive failure a democracy can commit, and not only in euros. That is why the news should not be read as a happy administrative ending, but as a reminder of where the guarantee is really at stake: in first instance, in the quality of the technical defence from day one, in resistance to weak evidence when social pressure demands conviction.
The precedent that remains
The judgment is not a theoretical pardon: it is a roadmap. Lawyers handling manifest judicial error cases now have a direct argument against formal inadmissions. And the Ministry of Justice, whose report is mandatory but not binding, is better placed to resolve without dragging the claimant into another trial. It would be good news if the doctrine were applied generously: every month of added procedure is one more month of the original conviction.
The debt to technical defence
Triumphant review cases are not born at the Supreme Court: they are born of lawyers who sustain their client's innocence against the current, for years, with files everyone considers closed. Behind every Tommouhi there is a defence that did not surrender. The best professional lesson of this judgment is not the compensation route it opens, but the standard it recalls: criminal defence is the last dyke before error becomes conviction, and afterwards, years.
That the system repairs is fair. That it takes decades to do so is the exact measure of what remains to be improved. And that reparation, once due, arrives without forcing the victim into a second judicial race is, today, the simplest proof that the system has learned something from its own errors.
We publish analysis and editorials daily in opinion and commented case law in news, such as the recent STS on the partner's moral damage in informed consent.
