The Victim's Testimony as the Only Evidence for the Prosecution: How It Is Assessed

A large share of the offences that reach trial are committed with no witnesses and no physical trace: between two people, in a home, with no cameras and no documents. In those cases the prosecution rests on a single source, the statement of the person who reported the offence, and the defence faces an uncomfortable question: can a conviction rest on one piece of testimony alone? The answer under Spanish law is that it can, but on conditions that are worth knowing precisely.

You are accused of an act with no witnesses: the problem of a single testimony

The Spanish system of criminal procedure does not tie evidence to fixed rules about numbers. Art. 741 LECrim directs the court to assess, according to its own conscience, the evidence given at trial, the arguments put by the prosecution and the defence, and what the defendants themselves have said. There is therefore no rule requiring two witnesses, and none that rules out the injured party's evidence because of their interest in the outcome.

What does exist is a constitutional limit. The presumption of innocence in Article 24.2 of the Spanish Constitution requires a conviction to rest on valid prosecution evidence, given with the guarantees of adversarial challenge, immediacy and open justice, and sufficient to displace that presumption. Where the evidence comes down to a single statement, that requirement is not relaxed: it shifts to the reasoning. The court must explain why it finds that statement credible, and that reasoning can be reviewed on appeal.

To structure that review, Spanish case law has for decades used three assessment tests. They are not in the statute and they are not conditions of validity, but they shape both the judgment and the work of the defence.

First test: absence of subjective grounds for disbelief

The first criterion looks at whether there are reasons unconnected with the alleged offence that would explain the complaint: an earlier financial dispute, a fight over custody of the children, a broken employment relationship, or ongoing civil or family proceedings. The point is to check whether the testimony may have been driven by an ulterior motive.

Two clarifications stop this test from being misused. First: the existence of an earlier conflict does not invalidate the statement. It is common for the person reporting the offence to be in a difficult relationship with the person reported, precisely because the offence grows out of that relationship, and confusing background with ulterior motive would mean dismissing most complaints between people who know each other.

Second: what the defence has to establish is not hostility, but the connection between that hostility and the specific content of the complaint. A relevant motive is one that explains why that allegation was made at that moment. Documenting the chronology, such as the date of the divorce petition, the dismissal or the debt claim, is more useful than describing a bad atmosphere.

Second test: plausibility and peripheral corroboration

The second criterion has two levels. An internal one: the account should be logical, coherent and consistent with ordinary experience. And an external one: there should be objective peripheral corroboration, meaning material outside the statement itself that supports it.

Corroboration does not prove the act on its own; if it did, this would no longer be a case resting on a single piece of evidence. Its role is different: to confirm elements of the account that can be checked. An injury report consistent with the mechanism described, messages or calls placing people at a particular time and place, a medical or psychological report, hearsay witnesses giving evidence about the state the person was found in, or how quickly the complaint was made.

That is why a complete absence of corroboration is one of the classic lines of defence, and why the work often consists of checking whether the items the judgment presents as corroboration really are corroboration. A witness who merely repeats what the complainant told them corroborates nothing: they repeat the same source. A psychological report describing an emotional state establishes that state, not its specific cause.

Third test: consistency in the accusation

The third criterion looks at how stable the account is across the proceedings: whether it is free of ambiguity and of substantial contradictions between the initial complaint, the statement given during the investigation and the evidence at trial, and whether the essential line of the accusation is maintained.

The procedural tool for working on this is Art. 714 LECrim: where the evidence given at trial is not substantially consistent with the statement made during the investigation, any party may ask for the latter to be read out, and the presiding judge invites the witness to explain the difference or contradiction. It is a tool for the defence as much as for the prosecution, and it requires a word-by-word comparison of the earlier statements to have been prepared in advance.

A word of caution on method is needed here too. Not every variation is a relevant contradiction: peripheral details change over time in any honest account, and case law distinguishes between incidental divergence and divergence that affects the core of the alleged act. A defence that piles up twenty minor discrepancies weakens its own argument; one that isolates the contradiction affecting an element of the offence strengthens it.

Art. 715 LECrim completes the picture: where a witness who gave a statement during the investigation also appears at trial on the same facts, proceedings for perjury may only be brought in respect of the evidence given at that trial.

The three tests are not requirements of validity

This is the most common framing error. The three criteria appear neither in the LECrim nor in the Criminal Code: they are guidelines for reviewing whether the assessment was rational. Three practical consequences follow.

• They are not a checklist. The failure of one of them does not compel an acquittal, just as the presence of all three does not compel a conviction.
• They are weighed together. Solid corroboration can offset a minor divergence in the account, and the other way round.
• Their main value is on appeal. Because they structure the reasoning, they allow the higher court to check whether that reasoning was sound or whether it simply asserted that the testimony was found credible.

That is why a defence limited to denying credibility rarely gets anywhere. What opens a route is pointing to the specific link in the reasoning that does not hold, and explaining why the available material does not support the required degree of certainty.

When the statement is taken before the trial

There are situations in which the statement is not given before the court that decides the case. Art. 449 bis LECrim governs pre-constituted evidence: the court guarantees the adversarial principle; the absence of a properly summoned person under investigation does not prevent the statement being taken, but their defence lawyer must be present in every case; and the statement is recorded on a medium capable of capturing sound and image, whose quality the court clerk checks immediately, with a short record identifying everyone involved.

Art. 449 ter LECrim makes this compulsory, not merely available, where the witness is a child under fourteen or a person with a disability in need of special protection in proceedings for the offences it lists, with all the guarantees of evidence at trial, avoiding visual confrontation with the person under investigation and allowing the hearing to be conducted through psychosocial teams, to whom the parties put their questions after the court has checked that they are relevant and useful.

Afterwards, Art. 730.2 LECrim allows the audiovisual recording of that statement to be played at trial at the request of any party. The consequence for the defence is one of timing: where evidence is pre-constituted, the only chance to cross-examine is during the investigation. Attending that step without having studied the file amounts to giving up the right to challenge. The specific treatment of these situations is covered in the testimony of a child victim.

The exemption in Art. 416 LECrim

Where the person giving evidence is linked to the defendant by one of the relationships listed in Art. 416 LECrim, namely relatives in the direct ascending and descending line, a spouse or a person in an equivalent relationship, and siblings and blood collaterals up to the second degree, an exemption from the duty to give evidence applies, and the judge must warn them of it.

That exemption has express exceptions: it does not apply where the witness has legal representation or de facto care of a victim who is a child or a person with a disability in need of special protection; where the offence is a serious one, the witness is an adult and the victim is a child or a person with a disability in need of special protection; where because of age or disability the witness cannot understand the meaning of the exemption; where the witness is or has been joined to the proceedings as a private prosecutor; and where the witness has agreed to give evidence during the proceedings after being properly informed of the right not to do so.

This procedural detail matters, because relying on the exemption at trial changes the evidential picture completely. The consequences of joining the proceedings as a prosecutor are examined in the exemption from giving evidence and private prosecution.

How the defence works against a single testimony

The work starts long before the trial and consists, above all, in building the objective comparison that the account itself lacks. This is the order we follow in our criminal defence work:

• A word-by-word comparison of every version. The complaint, any supplement to it, the statement during the investigation and the evidence at trial, line by line, to isolate the contradiction that affects the core of the alleged act rather than incidental variations.
• A documented chronology of the background. Ongoing civil, employment or family proceedings, with dates, so that subjective grounds for disbelief can be assessed on evidence rather than impressions.
• An audit of the corroboration. Check which items contribute an independent objective fact and which merely repeat the same source.
• Evidence of the defence's own. Location data, call and message logs, defence witnesses, expert reports on the mechanism of the injuries or on the reliability of an earlier report.
• Real involvement in pre-constituted evidence. If the statement is going to be pre-constituted, prepare the cross-examination for that hearing and not for the trial.
• Preparing the defendant. The general guidance is set out in how to give evidence at a criminal trial.

If you are accused of an act where the evidence comes down to a single statement, the room for the defence lies in the documentary detail, and that work takes time. You can speak to us on 91 078 65 74.