€2.5 million for 15 years in prison as an innocent man: the Supreme Court ruling that reshapes compensation for judicial error in Spain

A landmark ruling that reshapes State liability for judicial error

Few decisions expose the fragility of criminal justice as starkly as the one handed down by the Administrative Chamber of the Spanish Supreme Court on 18 June 2026. The Court awards €2.5 million to Ahmed Tommouhi —a Moroccan citizen who arrived in Spain in 1991 at the age of 40— after he spent 15 years in prison for ten rapes he did not commit.

The case, often compared with *The Count of Monte Cristo* and Kafka's *The Trial*, does more than heal a human wound: it rewrites the doctrine on judicial error and dismantles the restrictive reading of Article 293 of the Organic Law of the Judiciary (LOPJ).

> Core thesis: where essential, objective evidence validly incorporated into the proceedings is ignored and proves decisive for the conviction, no prior judicial declaration of error is required. The Third Chamber opens a direct route to redress.

1. The facts: 36 years pleading an ignored innocence

Mr Tommouhi's path is paradigmatic of institutional failure:

• 1991-1992: arrest and conviction in a chain of 26 sexual-assault proceedings in Catalonia, all decided against him.
• The decisive evidence was a visual line-up by victims, despite a biological (DNA) analysis excluding his profile from the semen found on the clothing.
• His compatriot Abderrazak Mouni, equally innocent and convicted as a supposed accomplice, died in prison without ever seeing the error acknowledged.
• A Civil Guard forensic scientist, Reyes Benítez, never believed his guilt and spent years building the case to identify the real perpetrator — later convicted of similar offences and bearing a striking physical resemblance to Tommouhi.
• In 2023, the Second (Criminal) Chamber of the Supreme Court entered an acquittal after the 2015 reform of criminal review proceedings, which freed the convicted person from the impossible burden of proving innocence.

Thirty-six years after he started shouting it, the State finally heard him.

2. The previous maze: why compensation had been refused

After the acquittal, the second ordeal began —the administrative one. Both the Ministry of Justice and the National High Court rejected compensation on a purely formal ground:

• Article 293 LOPJ requires a prior judicial declaration expressly recognising the error.
• The National Court considered that an erroneous assessment of evidence did not amount to a manifest judicial error.
• A restrictive doctrine therefore made compensation virtually unreachable even for innocent people backed by scientific evidence of non-participation.

The outcome was Kafkaesque: the State admitted convicting an innocent man yet refused redress on a procedural defect.