The proposal by the federal deputy (Solidariedade-SP) with the aim of reducing the sentences of those convicted on the 8th of January provides for changes to the Penal Code and the Penal Execution Law. Therefore, the application to defendants and convicts in specific cases would still depend on.
In addition to being able to be applied to past cases, in whatever way is most beneficial to the defendant, the new rules, if approved, will also apply to future episodes.
Understand the points foreseen in the proposal.
AMPLITUDE
After weeks of uncertainty, given the lack of agreement on the text, the president of , (), decided that the project would be voted on this Tuesday (9) by the plenary. The project that will be put to a vote in the Chamber would have been to restrict it to the reduction of sentences instead of a broad, general and unrestricted pardon for Bolsonaro and those arrested for participating in the January 8 attacks.
UNSUMMED PENALTIES
Both those convicted only for the 8th of January and those judged in the actions of the coup plot, such as the former president (PL) had their conduct framed by the crimes of attempted abolition of the democratic rule of law and coup d’état.
Paulinho’s proposal seeks to restrict the way in which the Judiciary can apply these two crimes, determining that when these crimes are in the same context, the crimes cannot have their sentences combined. It also says that this applies even when there is “autonomous design”, that is, when there is the intention to commit each of the different crimes.
CRIME COMMITTED BY A CROWD
Another section of the project says that when these two crimes, attempting to abolish the democratic rule of law and attempting a coup, are committed “in a crowd”, the sentence will be reduced by one third to two thirds.
This reduction, however, cannot be applied to any of the defendants, but only to those who have not “carried out a financing act or exercised a leadership role”. Such a rule, therefore, could in theory benefit the executors of January 8, but not names like the former president.
REGIME PROGRESSION
Furthermore, the project makes changes to the Criminal Execution Law, with regard to the criteria for sentence progression in general. It now adopts again as a general rule for progression to a more beneficial regime, serving one-sixth of the sentence (approximately 16%), creating a series of exceptions.
In current law, there is no general rule and the lowest value, 16%, is provided for when the convict is a first-time offender and the crime was committed without violence to the person or serious threat. In the case of primaries in which there was violence against the person or a serious threat, an aspect that encompasses all the convictions of the 8th of January and the coup plot, the current percentage is 25%.
Therefore, Paulinho da Força’s proposal has the potential to reduce from a quarter to a sixth the sentence that must be served by the primary convicts of 8/1 and the coup plot so that they have the possibility of sentence progression.
REMISSION OF PENALTY
The text also includes that anyone serving a sentence at home is not prevented from having their sentence remitted, that is, when work or study tasks can be considered to reduce the days of their sentence.
