The (Superior Military Court) should only judge in the middle of 2026 the loss of rank of those at the crucial core of the group led by the former president ().
The decision must be taken after public disagreements between court ministers and will involve, in the role of judges, former colleagues in uniform and subordinates of the condemned.
The STM will evaluate the cases of Bolsonaro, who is a retired captain, retired generals Augusto Heleno, and admiral Almir Garnier.
According to Sheet found out, the expectation is that each person in uniform will have the case reported by a different minister, after a draw to assign rapporteurs and reviewers.
The understanding is that, although the cases were analyzed together by the (Federal Supreme Court), which judges the behavior of the military, therefore, there would be no justification for bringing the cases together under a single report.
The court will assess whether the soldiers committed acts considered unworthy of officers and should have their ranks revoked. Officials are subject to this type of action for those convicted, with a final and unappealable sentence, to a custodial sentence of more than two years for a military or common crime.
Because of this focus, the case of whistleblower Mauro Cid, who received a two-year sentence in the STF, will not be analyzed.
Those convicted in Military Justice are expelled from the Forces, and leave a pension for their family members.
The STM is made up of 15 ministers: 5 civilians and 10 military (four from the Army, three from the Navy and three from the Air Force).
Among them are colleagues in uniform and former subordinates of the military involved in the coup plot.
Heleno was an instructor at the Agulhas Negras Military Academy for two of the four ministers-general of the court’s current composition, cadets Odilson Sampaio Benzi and Marco Antônio de Farias.
Paulo Sérgio was commander of the Army for 13 months, from March 31, 2021 to April 1, 2022. During this period, he had in his High Command two of the four ministers who occupy the seats allocated to the Army, generals Lourival Carvalho Silva and Guido Amin Naves.
Garnier was at the Admiralty —a collegiate of admirals of the highest rank— with the three STM ministers from the Naval Force, squadron admirals Leonardo Puntel, Celso Luiz Nazareth and Cláudio Portugal de Viveiros.
The ministers’ personal relationships with those convicted and those involved in the coup plot must permeate the trial, assess three members of the STM heard by the Sheet.
Sentenced to 21 years in prison, Heleno is cited as one of the most respected generals in the Army. He was one of the Force’s main references in the last 20 years, with outstanding work in Haiti and in the Amazon Military Command.
In the case of Braga Netto, the situation is seen as less favorable due to the fact that he launched attacks on the heads of the Army and Air Force who opposed the coup and, according to the accusation, financed a plan to assassinate STF minister Alexandre de Moraes, which the military denies.
Procedure and disagreement
The military court’s decision on patents will take place in a public trial in the plenary.
The president of the STM, , received the letters sent by the Supreme Court regarding the final decision this Wednesday (26).
From now on, the court will await representations on the cases from the Attorney General’s Office of Military Justice.
When this occurs, the court must distribute each case to the rapporteurs and schedule the judgments when the ministers’ votes are ready.
The Judiciary recess begins on December 19th.
There is an expectation that there will be no request for review of the processes. But the trials may have different progress, both due to the fact that the cases are distributed to different rapporteurs and due to the recent disagreement between ministers involving discussion about the participation of military personnel in a coup d’état.
At the end of October, the minister, a lieutenant brigadier of the Air Force, apologized to the victims of the Air Force after her. He said she should “study a little more of the court’s history to give her opinion on the situation in the historical period.”
Elizabeth responded by saying she knew the history of the dictatorship well and said she did not accept what her colleague used.
The court’s internal rules define that, in cases of a tie, the president is responsible for adopting the decision most favorable to the defendant.
