The First Panel of the (Federal Supreme Court) added in 2025 to the list of criminal actions with great public repercussion analyzed by the court in recent decades, after a jurisdiction and other internal rules that generate a scenario of instability, according to experts.
which has as its object the investigation of crimes and the application of penalties and which has already motivated debates linked to , to and to , is not an exclusive responsibility of the Supreme Court, which also has the functions of constitutional court and appeals. The court’s jurisdiction to process and judge these cases is restricted to cases involving defendants with the prerogative of the functional forum, also known as .
In the case of the coup plot, there were questions from the (PL) defense about the STF’s competence to judge it in the First Panel, initially formed by five ministers, instead of the plenary, with 11 magistrates.
A Sheet brought together, in a timeline, the changes made in recent decades to the rules for these trials, at points such as , the competent internal bodies (classes or plenary) and the virtual plenary. The time window goes from 2007, the year in which the Mensalão complaint was accepted by the STF, to 2025, when the court concluded the trial of the coup plot.
Lawyers, teachers and judges interviewed by the report agree that the number of changes could be , they disagree on the need for these changes and they do not risk making predictions about the stability of the current scenario.
For Antônio José Teixeira Martins, professor of criminal law at the (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) and Uerj (State University of Rio de Janeiro), the back-and-forth in the rules generates instability, and the relationship between the changes and high-profile cases, such as the Mensalão and 8 de Janeiro, can give the impression of —when the change is intended to produce particular effects for a specific case and does not aim at a general improvement of the trial rules.
Martins, however, considers that a lot can be learned from actions of great repercussion and great complexity. “It is natural, therefore, that there is an adaptation of some rules based on experience or based on the needs of the moment. The important thing is to find a balance.”
The , for example, was judged in plenary by the 11 ministers. In total, the sessions took around four months and were an obstacle for the court to deliberate on other topics.
As a result, in June 2014, around three months after the conclusion of the process, the criminal actions judged in the Supreme Court began to be analyzed by the groups.
In October 2020, however, the plenary’s jurisdiction was reestablished on the initiative of the minister and then president of the STF. He justified that the plenary had brought agility to the court and that it was also necessary to change the rule after changes made two years earlier in relation to the special forum.
In December 2018, the court functioned for crimes committed during and because of the mandate, generating a decrease in the number of criminal actions and investigations being processed by the STF. For Fux, this would allow these processes to return to the plenary.
Before that, also in June 2014, the Supreme Court had corrected a distortion in the current rule for the special forum that allowed politicians to resign from their positions, referring cases to first-degree judges.
The topic would be to predict the .
Over the years, it is possible to observe what the court takes to complete the analysis of criminal actions. The main mensalão processes, for example, extended from August 2007 (acceptance of the complaint) to March 2014 (final decision), totaling approximately six years and seven months. In the case of the crucial core of the coup plot, which includes Bolsonaro, the same interval was eight months, from March to November 2025.
José Duarte Neto, professor of constitutional law at Unesp (Universidade Estadual Paulista), says that changes in the special forum and judging bodies should not be classified as casuistic, but as pragmatic. For him, however, the adjective does not eliminate the problem that the back and forth in these rules causes.
“I think the big problem with everything is not the jurisprudential change, but the frequency, which creates instability”, he says. “The changes should not be pragmatic, imposed by the urgency of the situation. It should be thought, in the long term, what the impact will be from the point of view of the result of the knowledge and application of the law.”
Guilherme Carnelós, lawyer and president of the (Institute for the Defense of the Right to Defense), on the other hand, states that the back and forth in the rules is case by case. For him, the justifications generally presented follow a “logic of efficiency”.
“Competence should not be defined based on efficiency. […] The speed in conducting the process is the defendant’s right and not a magistrate’s tool”, says the lawyer, who is also opposed to the advancement of virtual trials for criminal actions.
Since 2020, the STF has made it possible for all classes of actions to be judged in this way, through the virtual plenary. Carnelós criticizes the resource for not allowing immediate interventions by the defendants’ defenses and says it is an “instrument to remove the lawyer from the process”.
Defenders of the model, on the other hand, cite the speed of trials, the reduction of spectacularization and the dynamics that deconcentrate power among the members of the court, since any minister can guide a process for his report by releasing it online, without depending on the president of the Supreme Court.
