The Federal Supreme Court (STF) unanimously decided to maintain the preventive detention of former president Jair Bolsonaro, ordered after violating the electronic ankle bracelet. The extraordinary trial was called this Monday (24), in the virtual plenary of the First Panel of the STF.
The last vote was minister Cármen Lúcia. In addition to her, Alexandre de Moraes, Flávio Dino and Cristiano Zanin voted to confirm preventive detention. The score ended in .
What happens now?
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Bolsonaro must remain in prison until the end of the appeals in the criminal action for the coup plot, in which he was sentenced to 27 years and 3 months. When the coup attempt process comes to an end, which should happen in the next few days, preventive detention will be replaced by the execution of the sentence, that is, the former president must not return home during the processing of the appeals and tends to remain in prison in a closed regime to begin serving his sentence.
When decreeing the arrest, Moraes considered that Bolsonaro violated the equipment because he intended to escape. The former president is detained in a state room at the Federal Police headquarters in Brasília. The 12 square meter space, with a television and minibar, is reserved for authorities.
What Bolsonaro’s defense says
The former president’s defense argued, in a statement to the Federal Supreme Court (STF) that, even though he burned the ankle bracelet, Jair Bolsonaro did not remove the equipment. Furthermore, he reinforced what had been said by the former president in the custody hearing, pointing out “side effects due to the different medications prescribed”. According to the defense, this led to “persecutory thoughts that are far from reality”.
For Bolsonaro’s lawyers, Celso Vilardi, Paulo Amador da Cunha Bueno and Daniel Tesser, the former president did not try to escape: “Nothing, in the action described in the documents produced by SEAP (Secretariat of State for Penitentiary Administration), narrates an attempt to escape or disconnect the electronic ankle bracelet. Quite the contrary, it exposes illogical behavior that can be explained by the possible mental confusion caused by the medications ingested by Bolsonaro, his advanced age and the stress to which he is unequivocally subjected”, say the lawyers.
