The Attorney General of São Paulo, Mario Luiz Sarrubbo, sent a letter to the PGR (Attorney General of the Republic) asking that the body activate the STF (Federal Supreme Court) against the president’s decree Jair Bolsonaro (PL) which granted Christmas pardons to police and military personnel, including those convicted of the Carandiru massacre.
The document was sent to the Attorney General of the Republic, Augusto Aras, on Friday (23.Dec.2022). According to MP-SP, Bolsonaro’s pardon violates the Constitution and norms of the American Convention on Human Rights. read the full of the letter (419 KB).
Bolsonaro’s decree was published in this Friday’s (Dec.23) edition of the GIVE 🇧🇷Official Diary of the Union🇧🇷 Here’s the full (110 KB). According to the text, pardon is granted to police officers convicted, albeit provisionally, of a crime committed more than 30 years ago and which at the time was not considered heinous.
The pardon applies to crimes committed by police officers in the Carandiru massacre, which took place in October 1992. At the time, 111 prisoners were killed in a police operation at the prison complex, in São Paulo. 74 State agents were sentenced by the Jury to sentences ranging from 48 to 624 years in prison.
As found out Power360Aras must file a lawsuit at the Supreme Court on Monday (Dec. 26) to invalidate the president’s pardon decree.
According to Sarrubbo, Bolsonaro’s decree is “attacking human dignity and the most basic and common principles of public international law”. He also stated that the pardon “presents itself as an affront to the decisions of international monitoring and control bodies related to human rights, being able, therefore, to hold Brazil responsible (once again) for violating human rights”.
In the letter, Sarrubbo said that, even if not expressly declared, “the act of the Chief of the Executive Branch is addressed to those condemned in the well-known Carandiru massacre”.
“Verily, the decree contains an act of grace, with certain addressees. In this scenario, the benefit depended on the request of the interested parties, which did not occur, violating our legislation”said the São Paulo attorney general.
“The presidential act that pardons police officers who participated in the massacre goes against the grain of international decisions against Brazil and, therefore, does not pass unscathed to the due control of conventionality of normative acts, which must also be exercised by the Public Ministry in its mission to defense of the legal order.”
Carandiru
Convictions for the Carandiru massacre can no longer be reviewed in court and the police’s defense seeks to reduce the size of the sentences.
The 4th Chamber of Criminal Law of the TJ-SP (Court of Justice of São Paulo) began judging on November 22 the defense appeals of the police officers convicted in the case. Judge of 2nd Instance Edison Aparecido Brandão requested a review of the case (more time for analysis). The trial is expected to resume at the end of January 2023.
Of those convicted, 5 have died over the 30 years since the case.
The TJ-SP had annulled the convictions at the end of 2018 because it understood that the decision had been given contrary to what the evidence contained in the process.
In August 2021, the 5th Panel of the STJ (Superior Court of Justice) had confirmed the decision of Minister Joel Ilan Paciornik, in June, to reinstate the convictions of police officers.
In August of this year, Minister Roberto Barroso, of the STF (Federal Supreme Court), had denied an appeal by the defense and upheld the conviction of the police officers. The process at the Supreme Court ended (when the decision becomes final and there are no more appeals) on November 16. From then on, the TJ-SP was able to resume the trial of the defense’s appeals on the amount of penalties.
The Carandiru massacre was a police operation after a prisoner rebellion in Pavilion 9 of the House of Detention, in the Carandiru Penitentiary Complex.
Pardon
Bolsonaro granted a Christmas pardon in all the years of his government in 2019, 2020 and 2021. The benefit can only be offered by presidential decree to Brazilians or foreigners. It can be full or partial, when the sentence to be served is reduced – this is the so-called “commutation” of the sentence.
This year’s decree grants pardon to public agents that make up the national public security system. Federal police, civil police, military police, firefighters, among others who, in the exercise of their functions or as a result of them, have committed unintentional crimes are benefited.
The measure also includes members of the Armed Forces who acted in GLO (Guarantee of Law and Order) operations and were convicted of crimes in cases of culpable excess.
Pardon of sentence is also applied to convicts who, after committing the crime, have been affected by paraplegia, tetraplegia or blindness; have a permanent serious illness that imposes severe limitations; or who are seriously ill, in the terminal stage.
🇧🇷Pardon is also granted to persons over 70 years of age sentenced to deprivation of liberty, who have served at least 1/3 of the sentence, and to persons convicted in general for a crime whose maximum sentence of deprivation of liberty in abstract does not be more than 5 years”, informed the General Secretariat of the Presidency, in a note.
The possibility of pardon is foreseen in the Federal Constitution and in the Penal Execution Law🇧🇷 Serious crimes are excluded from the pardon, such as, for example, heinous crimes, torture, related to criminal organizations, terrorism, drug trafficking, pedophilia and corruption.
Convicted persons who have committed serious disciplinary infractions are also not included in the decree.
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