Abstract
The article exposes and analyzes the potentialities and limits of the activities of public defenders who work in Brazilian criminal sentence enforcement courts. It is the result of a work of systematization of different research experiences carried out in recent years: an ethnographic research with the Public Defender's Office of São Paulo and a documentary research on criminal sentence enforcement proceedings in the state of Rio de Janeiro. After making some general considerations about the role of public legal assistance in the Brazilian criminal justice system, the article explores the role of public defenders in some key moments of a sentence enforcement process: in the elaboration of a request of benefit; in the inspection of procedural records; in the monitoring of the processing time of the court; and, finally, in the defense at administrative processes of disciplinary infractions. In all those situations it is possible to perceive the aporetic or paradoxical character of the public defenders’ operations. On the one hand, their intervention in sentence enforcement proceedings appears to be absolutely essential, triggering the rights and benefits that make the prison population flow through the prisons in Brazil. On the other hand, public defenders appear as agents that are absolutely powerless, if not entirely useless, because they are incapable of making the justice system observe, in due course, the most ordinary subjective rights of a convict.
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Notes
According to the Brazilian Penal Code, there are three regimes for carrying out a custodial sentence: the closed regime that applies in penitentiaries; the semi-open regime, to be carried out in agricultural or industrial penal colonies; and the open regime, to be carried out in the so-called “Casas de Albergado”, where the convicts are supposed to spend only nights and weekends. Despite the law, in reality, closed regime penitentiaries are full of people formally serving their sentences in semi-open regime; the semi-open regime units do not offer work opportunities in industry or agriculture – differing from the closed regime units only by a greater liberality in the circulation of prisoners inside the walls. “Casas de Albergado" do not even exist in most Brazilian states, so that the open regime is commonly served in the form of home confinement.
It is important to consider that the imprisonment of women has shown significantly higher growth rates in recent years than that of men.
This work is part of the broader project “The meanings of prison: resocialization and incapacitation in contemporary Brazilian prison reality”, coordinated by Professor Michel Misse and funded by the National Council for Technological Research and Development (CNPq). I thank Alline Schalcher, Julia Teodoro, Bruna Miranda, and David Maciel de Mello Neto for their collaboration in the preparation of the empirical data.
Benefit is the term used in legislation and in sentence enforcement proceedings to refer to the convict's subjective rights such as sentence progression, parole, periodic home visits and others.
Recently, Law 13.964/2019 amended article 121 of the Sentence Enforcement Law, extending fractions and further complexifying these objective criteria. However, since all the cases analyzed here began before this law came into effect, these new conditions are not applicable to them.
All proper names provided in this article are fictitious.
It should be noted that the period of fieldwork with the São Paulo Public Defender's Office took place while most of the state's sentence enforcement proceedings were not yet digitalized.
As I have already explained, these elements are important because they fall upon on the fractions of the sentence that must be served so that the sentenced person is entitled to each benefit, as established in article 112 of the Sentence Enforcement Law.
According to custom and current penal legislation, the pardon constitutes a presidential act that extinguishes an ongoing sentence. Every year, on the eve of Christmas, the President of the Republic issues a decree with the requirements that the convict must meet in order to be benefited. The same decree usually brings criteria for a partial pardon of the sentence, known as “commutation”.
According to article 197 of the Sentence Enforcement Law, the “grievance” is the instrument by which an appeal is made against a decision established in the course of a sentence enforcement process.
In quotes, the highlights are always original.
Since the 2003 Sentence Enforcement Law reform, the criminological examination is no longer a mandatory requirement in the filing of a benefit application. However, custom and jurisprudence give the judge the prerogative to request it whenever he deems it necessary. For an analysis of the nature, composition and implications of this examination, see Reishoffer and Bicalho (2017).
According to article 126 of the Sentence Enforcement Law, the benefit of remission implies the deduction of one day from the penalty for every three days of work or for every 12 h of study spread over three days of class.
According to article 132 of the Sentence Enforcement Law, among the conditions imposed on those who are on parole is the obligation to periodically report the occupation to the judge. In Rio de Janeiro, this requirement is usually fulfilled in an institution called Patronato Margarinos Torres.
The difference in the police treatment that is expressed in the granting of bail in 2012 and the unappealable arrest of Dafne in 2016 cannot be explained in legal or formal terms. To understand it, it is necessary to resort to literature that turns to the dynamics of policing which prevail in Rio de Janeiro and the central role that monetary negotiations play in them, whether formal, informal or illegal. For a comprehensive view of these dynamics and issues, see Misse (2006).
The “sequence” number is what identifies a particular manifestation in the digitized records of a process. They are equivalent to the “leaves” of a physical case file.
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Funding
This study was funded by the “Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel” (CAPES). The author has no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article. The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.
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Godoi, R. The helpless defense: Notes on the role of Brazilian public defenders in sentence enforcement proceedings. Crime Law Soc Change 79, 581–602 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-022-10056-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-022-10056-9