The Public Defense considers “a fraud to the rule of law” the way in which some courts calculate the redemptions accumulated by the deprived of liberty for them to opt for an alternative formula for serving the sentence. Because of this, the DP, an institution that provides legal assistance to those who do not have the resources to pay for a private lawyer, asked the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice for an interpretation of article 488 of the Organic Code of Criminal Procedure.
Said rule establishes the requirements for a prisoner who has already been sentenced to opt for alternative formulas for serving his sentence. This article also prohibits granting benefits to people convicted of at least 12 crimes considered serious until they have served three quarters of the sentence imposed.
Based on this last aspect, the DP asks the Criminal Chamber: “if the judicial redemptions for work and study are in force or, on the contrary, they are inapplicable, until the effective fulfillment of three-fourths of the sentence imposed?” .
The doubt raised by the DP stems from the fact that the reductions in the imposed sentence can be achieved through work and study, a circumstance that the court should take into account when applying a redemption, regardless of whether or not the defendant is involved in that catalog of the 12 serious crimes, according to the arguments of the aforementioned state entity. “The benefit, that the State gives, to those who seek to reintegrate into society, is the reduction of one (1) day of sentence for two (2) days of work and study,” the document states.
In this sense, the Public Defense recalled that one of the functions of the judges of the court of execution, consists of verifying the work and study records, which are in the administrative files of the convicts, with a view to the redemption and subsequent practice of a new sentence calculation, which will reflect the sentence redeemed for the time worked and studied.
“Being evident with this, the position of our legislator in rewarding, with a view to reinserting citizens who have worked and/or studied in less time, seeking effective resocialization,” indicates the appeal for interpretation filed before the Criminal Chamber.
“The fact of not understanding these paradigms, on the part of the justice operator, would be a fraud against the legislative ‘animus’ and the rule of law, that is, it would go against all the principles that protect compliance with penalty regimes,” he criticizes. Public Defense.
The aforementioned public institution denounces in its brief that judges apply various criteria to accept or not the redemptions that prisoners accumulate for work and study who seek to mitigate their sentence.
“For this reason, a unifying criterion is necessary and cannot be postponed,” requested the DP. In this regard, the magistrates of the Criminal Chamber declared the appeal inadmissible since it does not clearly raise the existence of a reasonable doubt about the content, scope and intelligence of paragraph 2 of article 488 of the Copp.
