By Indianara Goz
Brazil's prosecutor-general, Paulo Gonet, asked the Supreme Federal Court (STF), the country's highest court, on Thursday (Nov. 12) to reject the second request by former president Jair Bolsonaro's defense to annul his 27-year prison sentence in the so-called coup plot case. According to Gonet, the lawyers presented no new element capable of changing the sentence already imposed on Bolsonaro, Brazil's president from 2019 to 2022.
Prosecutor says legal requirements were not met
In his filing to the STF, Gonet argued that the request, known in Brazil as a revisão criminal (criminal review), does not meet the requirements set by law. He said no harm to the defense during the proceedings was demonstrated, and that the sentence rested on multiple pieces of evidence gathered in the criminal case.
A criminal review is a tool used to challenge a final conviction in the situations provided by law, such as when new evidence emerges. That is the requirement the Prosecutor-General's Office (PGR) says has not been fulfilled.
The defense's argument: chain of custody of digital evidence
The lawyers filed the request on Sept. 25. To support it, they pointed to a technical opinion as "new evidence." According to the defense, the document identified problems in the chain of custody and limits on verifying part of the digital evidence used in the case.
The chain of custody is the set of procedures that record and track a piece of evidence from collection to its use in court. For digital material, this control serves to verify the origin and integrity of the files.
There is, however, a point that weighs against the defense's argument. The opinion cited by the lawyers does not claim the evidence was tampered with. What it says is that, for part of the material examined, it was not possible to fully verify the origin and processing of the data.
Why it matters
This is the second time the defense has asked for the sentence's execution to be suspended. The case is one of the most politically weighty in Brazil, involving a former president from the country's right. The final word now rests with the STF, which must decide whether to accept the technical claim about the digital evidence or keep the former president's conviction as it stands.
VDD Analysis
The core of the case is the reliability of digital evidence in a trial of enormous political weight. By defending the right of a defense to check every file used against a defendant, VDD's conservative line holds that full transparency in the chain of custody serves every citizen, not just one political group. Even so, the facts laid out by the PGR and by the opinion itself show that the defense's argument does not point to tampering, and the Supreme Court's decision should rest on that.
