I am a criminal abolitionist. For me, we would only keep irremediably violent criminals behind bars, incapable of living in society. For others, other sanctions than imprisonment should be found.
My position may seem utopian, but it is only the continuation of a trend that has already been underway for almost three centuries. In Shakespeare’s England, the punishment usually given to those convicted of treason was hanging, drowning and quartering – and, ideally, the accused would reach the latter part of the sentence while breathing. Today, except the United States, all developed countries have stopped using the death penalty and crime rates are a fraction of what they were in the past.
But let’s put aside the world as I would like it to be and discuss the world as it is. Is the PL Dosimetry recently approved by Parliament a step forward or a setback? I would say that, because of the timing, the message conveyed by the PL is bad. She suggests that the STF was wrong to condemn the putschists within the legal parameters set by Parliament itself less than five years ago. I don’t think I was wrong. The intervention of parliamentarians leaves the feeling that the system is bending to the interests of powerful politicians, which should not happen in a serious Republic.
But aren’t Bolsonaro’s 27 years in prison an exaggeration? While comparative exercises are useful, it should be noted that Germany, Canada, France and the United Kingdom provide sentences of up to life in prison for perpetrators of frustrated scams. The sanctions in national legislation do not appear to constitute a case of an exacerbated punitive nature.
Recognizing that Brazil is not really a serious republic, we can breathe a sigh of relief. First, the broad amnesty envisaged by the Bolsonarists was abandoned. No less important, sentence reductions are not automatic. Detainees will have to initiate criminal proceedings and the STF will have some leeway to recalculate sentences based on the new parameters. In short, it could have been much worse.
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