The Kirchnerist judge, Laura De Marinis, justified the dismissal of charges against a 14-year-old accused of attempted robbery and questioned the application of the juvenile criminal system
The head of the Buenos Aires government announced the request for impeachment stating: “These guaranteeist judges who defend criminals must be exposed. This sentence is stained with blood. We will immediately request impeachment”, emphasizing that “decent people cannot continue to be hostages of decisions that guarantee crime”.
Furthermore, the head of the La Libertad Avanza senators' bloc, Patricia Bullrich, declared: “There are judges who are more concerned with protecting criminals than with delivering justice to the victims. It is very difficult to build a normal country like this. These guaranteeist judges only build impunity”.
On the national level, the approval of the Law 27.801 on the Juvenile Criminal Regime set the minimum age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 14 years in Argentina. However, the fight against crime clashes with the resistance of the ideological guaranteeism embodied by sectors of Kirchnerism entrenched in the Justice system.
The epicenter of this institutional blockage is located in the Juvenile, Contraventional and Misdemeanor Court No. 3 of Buenos Aires City, led by Judge Laura Beatriz De Marinis. Breaking the silence on Radio con Vos before journalists Ernesto Tenembaum and Gustavo Grabia, Judge Laura Beatriz De Marinis sought to justify her controversial ruling. In that interview, she uttered the phrase that outraged society: “Subjecting a 14-year-old to the criminal system is stigmatizing”.
Laura Beatriz De Marinis
Exonerating the minor from his responsibilities, the judge stated verbatim: “Applying the criminal system, the response from the criminal system, is regressive for this adolescent, because it is stigmatizing. In this context, we are dealing with a child who was not known to the State, who was without education and without food; we learned about his situation through the criminal system and then we apply the criminal system. Does that seem reasonable to you? I explained that it is not proportional”.
She also maintained that “subjecting to criminal proceedings is the last thing that should happen” and argued that “the law is in effect from the age of 14 and the 14-year-old population does not know it”. She even absurdly described the government's norm as “a beautiful tool to harmonize it with the Convention and to be able to work with the kids on a day-to-day basis”.
The specific case occurred on September 10 around 6:00 a.m. in CABA, when a 47-year-old man was chased by a group of teenagers. The victim ran, asked a police officer for help, and the youths were detained. With no injuries or completed robbery, the judge ordered the dismissal of the accused M.I.A., aged 14, qualifying the attempt as “clumsy and awkward”.
Laura Beatriz De Marinis
In her ruling, she justified: “As adults, we cannot punish children and adolescents for what we did not do, for having left them in abandonment in their early childhood, for not providing them with a normative figure that allows them to become responsible subjects”. She ordered the case to be referred to the Council for the Rights of Children and Adolescents, a ruling that was appealed by the prosecution and sent to the Chamber.
Juvenile offenders
De Marinis attempted to play the victim by claiming that “for the foundation of my decisions to be said that they will initiate an impeachment weakens democratic institutions” and that “talking about a ruling stained with blood in this case seems to distort what I resolved”.
After being photographed making the Peronist V, her political bias was exposed. The judge began her career in 2006 before graduating as a lawyer and was Deputy Secretary of the Legal Chamber since 2017.
She took office on December 19, 2023 and on December 28, 2023 intervened in the case against Carlos Manuel Andrés, the aggressor of the parking attendant Arturo López (aged 66, assaulted in Monserrat in November 2021 and a fugitive for 5 months until receiving 4 years and 6 months in prison). There, De Marinis revoked his house arrest.
In April 2026, in a streaming, she entered with the song “No hay héroes” by Lali quoting: “Sometimes the bad guy doesn't always pay, and sometimes nothing is fair”. To justify the unconstitutionality, she invoked the repealed Law 22.278, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, recommendations from the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child from 2018 and 2024, and concepts from neuroscience.
Her background includes granting parole on September 30, 2025 to a convicted person for involuntary manslaughter (J.A.B.) ordering 50 hours of community service after rejecting the prosecutor's report by Julieta Viola Villanueva; the acquittal on April 9, 2026 of L.B. (30 years) for usurpation of a plot of National Roads between August 9, 2024 and July 15, 2025; and the conviction in 2025 to 2 years of effective prison for an aggressor aged 42. Judicial sources estimate a near-certain revocation of her ruling in the Chamber
