Jaime R., the victim's husband, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for her murder with treachery in Vitoria in 2023 and an additional 2 years for child abandonment, as the couple's two-year-old daughter remained alone for 18 hours with her mother's body.

During the jury trial, the four prosecuting parties (the Public Prosecutor's Office, the private prosecutions from Maialen's family and the Council for the Minor of Álava, and the popular prosecution by the Clara Campoamor Association) requested 45 years in prison: 25 for murder, 8 for each of the two abortion offenses, and 4 for abandonment.

However, the judge notes in her ruling that the murder is in ideal concurrence with the abortions because the first offense was "the necessary means to commit the other," and the legal system prevents them from being punished separately. In any case, she has sentenced him to the highest penalty contemplated for a murder offense with treachery (25 years).

The Clara Campoamor Association is "very disappointed" with the verdict and is considering whether to appeal the ruling before the High Court of Justice of the Basque Country, as informed by the organization to EFE.

The association's lawyer in this trial, Cecilia Piris, stated that the 25-year sentence for murder is not "proportional to the magnitude of the harm caused, which has been three lives taken," and lamented that "the murder carries the same prison cost as if the victim had not been pregnant."

Furthermore, the lawyer adds in a statement, "the traumatic abandonment" of the couple's daughter is trivialized, as the murderer "left her locked up for hours next to the bloodied corpse of her murdered mother," which "has caused her serious and probably permanent psychological sequelae."

"Despite this, the sentence opts for the minimum penalty" to punish the abandonment of a minor, she criticized.

For its part, the association's president, José Miguel Fernández, warned that the sentence "revives arguments dangerously close to the old culture of victim blaming."

"It is a chilling message: if a woman returns to her aggressor, if she stays with him in a hotel, if she maintains contact, then gender violence becomes questionable. It is impossible not to recall the arguments with which victims of sexual assault were historically blamed: that she wore a short skirt, that she had been drinking, that she didn't close her legs properly...", he explained.

In his opinion, it is "ignored" that Maialen was murdered by her husband "in the context of a relationship marked by dynamics of control, inequality, and conflict, and yet this sentence interprets gender violence from stereotypes about how a woman should behave for her victimization to be credible."

"By demanding that a victim behave like a 'perfect victim' to be considered as such, women understand that the system will continue to examine them before the aggressor," he denounced.