73 Police Officers Found Guilty of Carandiru Massacre in 1992

04/03/2014 - 09h36

Twenty-two years after the Carandiru massacre, in which 111 prisoners died during a riot at the Carandiru prison in the north of São Paulo, the trial of the police officers accused of their murders reached a verdict yesterday.

After a trial lasting nearly a year, 73 of the 76 defendants were found guilty, and sentenced to jail terms amounting to a total of 20,876 years. However, all have the right to appeal before they begin to serve their sentences.

Three of the defendants were acquitted due to lack of evidence.

The trial was divided into four phases: one for each floor of the jail in which the slaughter occurred. In the final phase, 15 military police of the Special Operations Command (COE) were each sentenced to 48 years in jail for the murder of four prisoners on the third floor of the complex.

There is no deadline for appeals to the Court of Justice, and the incident may still be analyzed by higher tribunals, a decision which has received strong criticism from prosecutors working on the case.

The successful conviction of the police officers involved hinged on the claim of the Public Prosecutor's Office that it was not necessary to establish the identity of the individual responsible for each death in the complex.

The prosecutor's interpretation, which was accepted by the jury, was that the police acted together and collaborated in order to achieve a common goal. However, this hypothesis is controversial and has been the cause of much debate in legal circles.

INDIVIDUALIZATION

The argument for the defense was based on the same point. According to the lawyers defending the police, there was no evidence against any of the individual officers. A blanket conviction, therefore, would result in the punishment of innocent men. However, the argument was not successful.

The defense lawyer Celso Vendramini repeatedly criticized the organization of the trial, accusing both judge and jury members of bias. 'This jury is vindictive and ideologically motivated,' he said at one point.

The prosecutors argued repeatedly that the action of the police was excessive, and that they acted with the explicit intention of killing, in order to put down the riot as quickly as possible.

Presenting drawings of the victims to the court, state prosecutor Márcio Friggi highlighted the fact that the gunshot wounds were found in the region of the victims' heads and hearts, even in prisoners who had been shot from behind.

'The shots are so accurate because the police went in with the intention of killing. Did they need to act in this manner? Could they have not used gas, or non-lethal weaponry?' he asked.

There are still no convictions relating to 34 of the 111 deaths which occurred in the massacre. Nine were caused by blades, throwing doubt upon the authorship, and five were attributed to Colonel Luiz Nakaharada, who died in December 2013.

The remaining 20 cases remain unsolved as the bodies were found in corridors or in parts of the complex where the police were not active.