Primitivo González del Alba (February 24, 1849 – 1913) was a Spanish jurist, legal writer and criminologist from Burgos in northern Spain. He was involved in a number of famous criminal trials in the course of his career as a Public Prosecutor [Fiscal] and a judge, which took him to many parts of Spain and culminated in his appointment in 1911 to the highest court in Madrid, as a Magistrado del Tribunal Supremo de Justicia.
One of the leading Spanish criminologists of his day, his writings contributed to the debate on the underlying causes of crime. In particular, he stressed the importance of social factors in fostering crime, while maintaining, nevertheless, that individual free will [libre albedrío] still played a crucial role. In formulating this view, and by also articulating his belief that criminology would always be an evolving and never a static science, he challenged both the main schools of criminology (the Positivist school and the Classical school) and their rigid, opposing ideologies.
Birth and family background
Primitivo González del Alba [henceforth referred to in this article as Primitivo] was born on 24 February 1849 in the city of Burgos, and baptised two days later in the church of San Cosme y San Damián :es:Iglesia de San Cosme y San Damián (Burgos) with the full name of Primitivo Modesto Justo González del Alba. His father, Angel González y García (son of Alejandro González and Vicenta García), was a lieutenant in the army [teniente de infantería] who later became a captain in the newly formed Guardia Civil; at the time of Primitivo's birth he was deputy officer in the Archives Section [Oficial Segundo de la Sección Archivo de esta Capitanía General]. Primitivo's mother was Silvestra del Alba y Pardo, the daughter of Toribio del Alba and Hermenegilda Pardo. All Primitivo's grandparents were born in the city of Burgos, where he too was brought up. After the death of his father, the family moved close to the cathedral to live with his mother's brother, Pedro del Alba y Pardo, a clergyman who became Archdeacon of Burgos in 1865, when Primitivo was sixteen.
Primitivo's only sister, Petra [Juana Petra Cointa González del Alba], two years his senior, entered an enclosed convent in Burgos after being widowed at a young age and spent over forty years there as a nun, Sor Juana Petra. There was also a half-brother, Félix [Félix Santamaría del Alba], through a previous marriage of their mother's; he was a lawyer and politician who was elected as a Diputado representing Burgos in the Cortes and later became a Senador.
University, politics and journalism
Having left Burgos to study at the University of Valladolid, Primitivo graduated in Law [Derecho] on 19 June 1869 – a time of political upheaval, as the September Revolution of 1868 had driven Queen Isabella II into exile and led to two years of near-anarchy. Attracted to journalism, when still aged twenty, Primitivo was one of the editorial assistants on La Conciliación, a Valladolid daily newspaper published between November 1869 and April 1870. Its aim was to reconcile (in opposition to the far left and far right parties) the Liberal Unionists, Progressives and Democratic Monarchists, which had formed a precarious alliance after the September Revolution. Primitivo's writings, and the political affiliations of the other newspapers for which he contributed articles in later life, indicate a consistent sympathy with democratic, progressive and liberal views.
The beginnings of a legal career
Primitivo returned to Burgos to continue his legal studies at the Ilustre Colegio de Abogados , qualifying as a solicitor and, in December 1872, obtaining the second highest marks in the competitive examinations () to enter the ‘Cuerpo de Abogados del Estado’. This led in January 1873 to a government post in the Balearic Islands, as a state solicitor at Palma de Mallorca, during the period of the short-lived First Spanish Republic (1873–74). In June 1874 Primitivo applied to enter the judiciary, achieving third highest marks in the nationwide competitive examinations for this. In December 1874 he received his first judicial appointment, as the Judge [Juez de primera instancia] of the small hill town of Castrojeriz (Burgos), where he remained until 1881.
The Judge of Castrojeriz
Primitivo's appointment and seven-year stay in Castrojeriz came when the town needed stability, law and order. Carlist insurrections had recently caused outbreaks of civil war in northern Spain, and on 3 June 1874 a group of about 40 mounted Carlist soldiers had entered Castrojeriz, seizing money, goods and hostages. Over twenty years later Primitivo wrote an article in the Diario de Cádiz, ‘Luchas Fratricidas’ [Fratricidal Fighting], describing a particular atrocity they committed – whether one he personally witnessed, or heard about shortly afterwards, is not clear – when they killed one of the town's senior lawyers and taunted his wife and young son in front of the corpse. At the end of the article Primitivo explains he wrote it ‘since yesterday’s history is a useful lesson for tomorrow’ [‘el ayer en la historia es la provechosa lección del mañana’] and to remind those about to become men that they ought to regard the awful fratricidal fighting of civil war with a truly patriotic horror [‘quisiera solo recordar a los que pronto habrán de ser hombres, el horror verdaderamente patriótico que deberán sentir en su alma hacia las tremendas luchas fratricidas’]. These comments assume a tragic irony given that Primitivo's own son, born the same year he wrote this article, was to be killed during the Spanish Civil War in 1936.
In recognition of his services whilst in Castrojeriz, which included dealing with the complex trial [‘El Proceso de Belbimbre’] in July 1880 of a notorious gang accused of 62 crimes – a string of robberies throughout the provinces of Burgos and Palencia and several murders, including that of the parish priest of Belbimbre – Primitivo was awarded, by a royal decree of 18 October 1880, and at the age of thirty-one, the Cruz de Isabel la Católica :es:Gran Cruz de Isabel la Católica (in 1906, on his promotion as Presidente de Sala in Madrid, he was given the higher level of this award, the Gran Cruz de Isabel la Católica).
Successive appointments
After 1881, Primitivo moved a number of times in rapid succession as he was promoted to posts of increasing responsibility, mainly in Andalucia. From Castrojeriz he went to Cabra (Córdoba) :es:Cabra (Córdoba), where he was Juez de ascenso (1881–82); he then moved to Cádiz as Magistrado de la Audiencia de lo Criminal (1882–86), then to Utrera (Seville) where he spent the years 1886–92, first as Fiscal and then as Presidente de la Audiencia. Thereafter he briefly held posts in Granada (1892–93), Albacete (1893–94), Huelva (1894) and back in Cádiz (1895). In December 1895 he was posted to the Canary Islands as Fiscal de la Audiencia Territorial de Las Palmas and remained there until March 1897, when he was moved to the north of Spain to be Presidente de Sala de la Audiencia Territorial de Oviedo. He stayed here only nine months, being transferred at his request back to southern Spain in December 1897, to assume the equivalent position in Granada, where he stayed until further promotion took him to Madrid in August 1902.
For the remainder of his career Primitivo was in Madrid, firstly as Presidente de Sección de la Audiencia Judicial de Madrid (1902–06) and then as Presidente de Sala de la Audiencia de Madrid (1906–1910). In November 1910 he was appointed Presidente de la Audiencia Territorial de Madrid. Finally, in February 1911 he was appointed as Magistrado del Tribunal Supremo, a position which entitled him to be addressed as Excelentísimo, though his obituary by Antonio Soto y Hernández relates that informally he was affectionately known to everyone as ‘Don Primitivo’.
Famous trials
Primitivo was involved in a number of high profile trials reported in the regional and national press. These included a complicated case during his time in Cádiz, known as El Crimen de la Algaida, concerning the brutal murder in 1894 of a notorious and unpopular criminal. Two members of the local Guardia Rural, among many others, were implicated in the crime, but the jury ultimately found all the accused not guilty.
Whilst in the Canary Islands in 1896 Primitivo acted as Fiscal in the case of El Crimen de Taganana, a crime of passion on the island of Tenerife in which Irene Ravelo Suárez was accused of murdering her lover – by whom she had a child while her husband was in America – with an axe, causing a massive head wound which led to his death from encephalitic meningitis two months later. She was found guilty of the main charges, but extenuating circumstances led to her receiving a short prison sentence of a year and a day.
Another case, during Primitivo’s time in Granada, was what became known as El Crimen del Castillo de Locubín, a murder in October 1898 which shocked the nation. The victim, killed in a conspiracy between his wife, his son – a priest – and his brother-in-law, was lured to a lonely place far from his village, then poisoned, stabbed and disfigured so as to be unrecognisable. False identity papers were planted on the dead body to throw investigators onto a false track, and postcards were forged and posted to the real victim’s home village from Granada, saying that he had died of natural causes whilst on a trip to that city. His family went into mourning, the son saying a Requiem Mass for his deceased father, but suspicious neighbours caused a police enquiry to be made which revealed the postcards to be forged and led to the arrest of the three prime suspects, who were found guilty and sentenced to death. Primitivo’s widely praised and eloquent summing up of this case was published in full in the Revista General de Legislación y Jurisprudencia in 1900.
Murder in Fuencarral Street
The most sensational case to come before Primitivo in court was the crime of Fuencarral street, regarding a murder in Madrid in 1902. Primitivo’s summing up was described in the newspaper El Imparcial on 14 February 1903 as “un modelo de oratorio forense y de imparcialidad” [a model of forensic oratory and impartiality]. Cecilia Aznar, a maid of all work, was accused of murdering her eccentric employer, Manuel Pastor y Pastor, by hitting him repeatedly with a flat iron, and stealing a large amount of cash from him. She then fled by train to Barcelona, where she went on a spending spree with two male friends before being captured, after a massive nationwide hunt for her, near the French border. The case received enormous publicity because of the strange character of the victim, a wealthy and deeply religious convert to Protestantism who lived a frugal life punctuated by desperate attempts to seduce women. Brought back to Madrid for trial, Cecilia – whose three-year-old illegitimate son, whom she had given to her mother to raise, was dramatically brought into the courtroom in an attempt to gain the jury’s sympathy – alleged that she killed in self-defence as Pastor had tried to rape her, but it was proved that he must have been recumbent and asleep when the attack began. Found guilty, Cecilia was sentenced to death, but her sentence was commuted on appeal to life imprisonment. A fictionalised account of the case by Blanca Bertrand was published in 1986 as El Otro Crimen de la Calle de Fuencarral, Primitivo featuring in the chapters dealing with the court hearing and sentencing.
Publications