“[Jair Bolsonaro] He is a former president, but is being tried as if they were. If you are a former president, the process should go to the first degree judgment, ”says one of the judges
Judge Luiz Fux requested on Wednesday the “annulment of the case for absolute incompetence” of the first class of the Supreme Federal Court (STF) to judge the former Brazilian president for attempted coup.
The third of five judges of the Supreme Chamber of the Supreme Court supported the defendants’ defenses, after the day before, the rapporteur, Alexandre de Moraes, and Judge Flávio Dino voted for the conviction of Bolsonaro and the other seven defendants, in a trial that will end on Friday.
“[Jair Bolsonaro] He is a former president, but is being tried as if they were. If he is a former president, the process should go to the first-degree court, ”he said, saying that” due to the absolute incompetence for the trial, the declaration of nullity of all the decision-making practiced is required. “
Thus, the judge considered that the trial should be carried out at first instance and not start at the highest court in the country.
According to Luiz Fux, the Supreme Court can only judge a former Mandant for crimes committed during its term, so that occurred on January 8, 2023, when Bolsonaro was no longer in power, it is outside the jurisdiction of this Court.
“The defendants of this process, without any prerogative of forum, lost their positions long before the emergence of the current understanding,” he said, thus contradicting the considerations of his two colleagues who have already voted and the prosecutor who stated that the coup plan had started in mid -2021 through a campaign to delegitimize STF judges.
Still, he considered, if the understanding were that the trial could be made in the Supreme Court, it should be being held in the plenary and not just in the collective with five judges.
“By lowering the original competence of the plenary for one of the classes, we would be silenced the voices of ministers [juízes] that could sterilize the way of thinking about the facts to be judged in this criminal action, “he said.
Luiz Fux also complied with the defense of the defendants that there would be too many documents in the process and did not have time to analyze it in detail.
“Due to the late availability of a data tsunami, ‘data dump’, without sufficient identification, minimally reasonable in advance for procedural acts, and I confess that I had difficulty elaborating the vote, I welcome the preliminary violation of the guarantee of broad defense,” he said.
The judge did not agree with the defenses of the defendants of the defendant’s nullity of the defendant Mauro Cid, former Bolsonaro advisor, but argued that his sentence should not be smaller.
At the beginning of his statement, Luiz Fux also stressed that, “unlike the Legislative Power and the Executive Power, it is not for the Supreme Court to make a political judgment of what is good or bad, convenient or inconvenient, appropriate or inappropriate.”
The STF collective is formed by Judge Alexandre de Moraes (considered the ‘enemy number one’ of ‘Bolsonarism’), by Flávio Dino (former Justice Minister of President Lula da Silva), Luiz Fux (nominated for the then President Dilma Roussef), Cármen Lúcia (nominated to the STF by Lula da Silva) and Cristiano Zanin (former staff of Lula da Silva).
