Argenis Contreras will serve a 20-year sentence for the murder of Yuniol Ramírez
The Dominican justice system has definitively ratified the sentence against Argenis Contreras González, who must serve a 20-year prison sentence for his responsibility in the murder of lawyer and professor Yuniol Ramírez, which occurred in 2017. The Second Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice (SCJ) made this decision after rejecting the cassation appeal filed by the defendant’s defense, leaving the conviction final.
With this ruling, criminal sentence number 502-01-2025-SSEN-00181, initially issued by the Third Chamber of the Criminal Court of Appeals of the National District, is confirmed. Contreras must serve his sentence at the Najayo Men’s Correction and Rehabilitation Center (CCR) in San Cristóbal, in addition to assuming the payment of the procedural costs derived from the litigation.
Judicial process details
During the hearing before the high court, the Public Prosecutor’s Office, represented by Deputy Prosecutor Fadulia Rosa, requested the dismissal of the defense’s appeal, arguing that the previous judicial instances carried out an exhaustive and correct assessment of the evidence presented. Magistrates Francisco Antonio Jerez Mena, Nancy I. Salcedo Fernández, Fran Euclides Soto Sánchez, and Yorlin L. Vásquez Castro agreed that there were no grounds to reverse the decision.
The case, which was handled by prosecutors from the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office for the Prosecution of Administrative Corruption (Pepca), linked the tragic homicide to a network of irregularities operated at the Metropolitan Office of Bus Services (OMSA), the institution where Contreras served as head of the Purchasing and Contracting Department at the time of the crime.
The confirmation of this sentence marks the definitive closure of the appeal channels, ensuring that the person responsible for the crime serves the sentence established by the Dominican courts.
Case background
- Yuniol Ramírez, who presided over the National Convergence of Lawyers (CONA) and was a professor at the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo (UASD), was found lifeless in October 2017.
- His body was found in a ravine in Hato Nuevo, Santo Domingo Oeste, tied with chains and padlocks to a concrete block.
- After the event, Argenis Contreras fled to the United States, where he was captured years later and extradited to the Dominican Republic to face justice.
- The Public Prosecutor’s Office managed to establish, through various merged files, Contreras’s guilt on charges of homicide and concealment of a corpse.
This judicial outcome puts an end to one of the most high-profile cases in the country, reaffirming the justice system’s commitment to clarifying facts that involved acts of corruption and extreme violence.
