Reduced penalty and climate change for Lula | The e …

From Brasilia

Closer to freedom The Superior Court of Justice has partially accepted the appeal of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to reduce his sentence of imprisonment in Curitiba, in southern Brazil, from four to three months since 7 April. last year. "The problem is not to reduce the sentence, the penalty must be zero (..) until now, I did not have the right to a fair trial", protested on the part of the Superintendency of the Federal Police, who quickly became aware of the decision of the magistrates gathered in Brasilia "The struggle must continue In the same way that I was judged politically, I will be liberated politically by the resistance of the people , starting with the vigil "displayed every day in front of the police headquarters," he told his cell located on the fourth floor of the Monitoring Committee of MP PT Emídio de Souza.

Unanimously, the four members of the Fifth Chamber of the Court of Third Instance found that it would be appropriate to apply a sentence of eight years, ten months and twenty days. The Code of Criminal Procedure stipulates that after one-sixth of the sentence, which will be pronounced in September or October, the detainee may benefit from the semi-open regime which allows him to spend the day outside the prison where he returns the night. The reduction of the sentence must furthermore take into account the fact that the accused is over 70 years old and suffered laryngeal cancer diagnosed in 2011.

This was the first, albeit modest, victory of the leader of the Workers' Party since his conviction in 2017 by the federal judge of the time, then appointed by Curitiba Sergio Moro, mentor of the Lava Jato megacause. As a result, the decision of the Superior Court after 18 hours meant a setback for Moro, nicknamed Jair Bolsonaro's "superintendent" of justice. The former captain and incumbent president probably did not celebrate the mitigation of the arrest of the politician who feared him the most and who would not have won in the elections of October of last year.

When Lula was removed from the electoral conflict in September 2018, thanks to a series of politicized judicial measures, he had about 40% voting intentions, with a tendency to grow, while Bolsonaro had added 20 points or less . Lula in full or partial freedom from September would pose a threat to a government whose popularity would be reduced to 32% in less than a hundred days of management, according to a Datafolha survey conducted in early April.

A symptom of the alive leadership of the former mechanical turner was the expectation that had sparked last week's decision of the Federal Supreme Court (maximum of jurisdiction) to lift censorship and allow it to give an interview to the newspapers El País de Madrid and Folha de San Pablo.

Judges Felix Fischer, rapporteur of the case, Jorge Mussi, Reinaldo Soares da Fonseca and Ribeiro Dantas agreed yesterday to change the length of the sentence, but have ratified the sentences handed down for corruption and money laundering in the case of an apartment in the seaside resort of Guarujá.

"We respect the position presented today by the ministers of the Superior Court of Justice, but we disagree to understand that the only possible decision is the acquittal of former President Lula because 39, he has not committed any crime, "said defense lawyer Cristiano Zanin.

In addition to leading the team of lawyers, Zanin heads the London-based Lawfare Institute, where he denounces the legal war launched against several popular Latin American leaders through a judiciary in collusion with the oligopolistic press and other power factors, even external ones. . Along with Australian attorney Geoffrey Robertson, Zanin lodged a complaint with the United Nations Human Rights Council for violation of Lula 's procedural safeguards, which had already made way for the case. case.

In his appeal to the Superior Court, Lula's defense inter alia alleged the total nullity of the sentences pronounced at the first and second instance, to which they were imputed as defects of origin. The most serious is perhaps the fact of having based the case almost exclusively on reports of repentants, such as businessman Leo Pinheiro, in the absence of reliable evidence.

In his decision two years ago, Moro considered that Lula owned an apartment in Guarujá, even acknowledging that the former president had not spent the night in that apartment and that he was not in the apartment. there was no title documenting his property. The lack of evidence became more eloquent in 2018 when new documents indicated that the department in question had been delivered as collateral by a construction company.

Yesterday's decision of the Superior Court is only one of the chapters of a judicial saga that will include, within an undetermined period, a session of the Federal Supreme Court in which it will will be decided when it is constitutional that a second-instance convict, as is the case of Lula, he can be arrested. Or if all defendants can remain at liberty until exhaustion of remedies before the four levels of Brazilian justice.

Expect also a new verdict of the Federal Regional Court of Porto Alegre, in second instance, on a new conviction of the former president, this by a fifth in Atibaia, inside San Pablo, that justice attributed to Lula and that he denies, indicating that a friend lent it to him.