The (Superior Military Court) received this Tuesday (3) the representations of loss of rank of those from the crucial nucleus of the group led by the former president ().
The military court will evaluate the cases of Bolsonaro, who is a retired captain, retired generals Augusto Heleno, and admiral Almir Garnier.
Unlike the progress in the (Supreme Federal Court), with the central nucleus being judged in a criminal action, in the STM each of the uniformed personnel will have the case reported by a different minister. Due to the way the court works, when the prosecutor places the representation in the system, distribution to a rapporteur is automatic.
The understanding is that, although the cases were analyzed together by the STF, it 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. This decision has the repercussions of patent revocation. After completion and exhaustion of resources, the STM communicates the decision to the commander of the respective Force.
Officials who are sentenced to a custodial sentence of more than two years for a military or common crime are subject to this type of action.
The president of the STM, , received the letters sent by the Supreme Court regarding the final judgment on November 26th.
From then on, the court awaited representations on the cases from the Attorney General’s Office of Military Justice and now must distribute each case to the rapporteurs and schedule the judgments when the ministers’ votes are ready.
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.
Because of this focus, the case of whistleblower Mauro Cid, a lieutenant colonel who received a two-year sentence at 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.
The military court’s decision on patents will take place in a public trial in the plenary.
The analysis at the STM will be carried out after public disagreements between court ministers in the second half of last year.
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.
