Argentina Supreme Court upholds sentence for judicial official who spied on wife

The Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation has upheld a four-year prison sentence for Pablo Carlos Molina, a former judicial secretary in Corrientes, Argentina. Molina was convicted of abuse of authority and ideological falsehood.

In 2014, while serving as the head of the Criminal Secretariat No. 2 of the Federal Court of Corrientes, Molina used a narcotics investigation to mask the illegal interception of telephone communications. Suspecting his wife, Carolina Etel Codutti, of infidelity, Molina worked with then-federal judge Carlos Vicente Soto Dávila to issue an official document that authorized the National Gendarmerie to monitor the phone lines of both his wife and a man he suspected was her lover.

The illegal surveillance, which included calls and messages, was intended to last 30 days. The scheme was eventually uncovered in 2019 during a judicial audit, where 28 compact discs containing the intercepted communications were discovered. The Supreme Court, with signatures from Justices Horacio Rosatti, Carlos Rosenkrantz, and Ricardo Lorenzetti, rejected the defense's appeal, making the conviction final.