Thirty state and federal regional courts of justice in the country received this week a preliminary report from the National Council of Justice (CNJ) to review 496,765 criminal cases.
Four types of cases will be reviewed by the courts. More than 324 thousand cases (65% of the total) relate to the granting of Christmas pardons for people arrested for crimes without the use of violence or serious threats. Only 13% of the cases analyzed are considered serious.
Around 65 thousand cases are related to people who were caught carrying marijuana or cultivating the plant inside prisons and are facing disciplinary proceedings for this reason.
The courts must assess whether the possession was up to 40 grams of the drug or whether the arrest involved more than six marijuana plants, volumes considered by the Federal Supreme Court as an “administrative offense” and not a criminal offense.
The courts must also review the maintenance of preventive detentions, without any conviction and therefore lasting longer than one year. In addition to these, criminal execution processes in which there is no remaining sentence to be served or in which the sentence is prescribed must be evaluated, as well as processes that would require regime progression or conditional release.
The CNJ was created by Constitutional Amendment 45, in 2004, and began its activities in June 2005. Since 2008, the council has carried out joint efforts. Last year, 80,000 cases were reviewed by the courts and 21,000 people had their right to a change in sentence recognized.
The processes under review do not include cases from the courts of justice in Bahia, Espírito Santo and Rio de Janeiro, which did not provide information for the preparation of the CNJ’s preliminary report.
