Lawyers for former president Jair Bolsonaro asked Supreme Court Justice Kassio Nunes Marques on Thursday (24) for an injunction to suspend his prison sentence of 27 years and three months in the coup plot case. Bolsonaro has served the sentence under house arrest since March, for health reasons, and remains bound by court-imposed restrictions, according to news site g1.
Brazil's Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF), the country's top court, convicted Bolsonaro in September last year for leading an attempt to stage a coup. He began serving the sentence in November. The new request was filed inside a criminal review, a challenge to a final conviction that has been before Nunes Marques since May and has not yet been judged.
Defense says only the full bench could judge the case
The core argument is about quorum. According to the lawyers, the STF's internal rules assign the full bench, now with ten justices, the task of judging common crimes tied to the exercise of the presidency. Because the charges against Bolsonaro concern acts from his time in office, the defense argues the conviction by the First Panel, a smaller chamber now down to four members, is void.
"It is a maximum restriction on liberty, founded on a conviction whose validity is challenged for an absolute jurisdictional defect. Continuing to enforce the sentence while the criminal review is pending can cause irreparable harm. Wrongly suppressed liberty cannot be restored. Even if the criminal review is granted, the time already served under a flawed ruling cannot be returned in full," the lawyers wrote.
The defense also calls the 2023 rule change that gave the panels criminal jurisdiction an "expansive interpretation" of the court's internal rules. The lawyers argue the sentence should be suspended at least while the full bench has not judged the review, and cite the need to "repair the time of liberty unduly taken" from Bolsonaro, according to Folha de S.Paulo.
The jurisdiction question has already been through the court. At the September trial, Justices Alexandre de Moraes, Flávio Dino, Cristiano Zanin and Cármen Lúcia rejected the defense request to move the case to the full bench. They ruled that the 2023 rule change gave the panels jurisdiction over criminal cases. Luiz Fux, then a member of the First Panel, was the lone dissenter. Isolated in the chamber after the vote, he asked to move to the Second Panel, where he now sits with Gilmar Mendes, André Mendonça, Dias Toffoli and Nunes Marques himself, Folha reports.
The injunction now sits with Nunes Marques. The criminal review has no date on the court's calendar. Until he rules, Bolsonaro remains under house arrest with the restrictions set by the court.