The form and the and tenor of custody hearings in Rio de Janeiro: the drug law case

• Autor(a) principal: Campos, Marcelo
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista de Estudos Empíricos em Direito
• Texto Completo: https://reedrevista.org/reed/article/view/752
• topic: audiência de custódia; Lei de Drogas; Rio de Janeiro; custody hearing; Drug Law; Rio de Janeiro

The purpose of this article is to describe the main practices of the criminal justice system and its agents in the daily life of the Rio de Janeiro criminal justice system from the Custody Hearings, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, inside the Benfica prison. We sought to verify whether these legal “innovations” brought changes in the scope of the expansion of guarantees and fundamental rights of the accused; or if, on the contrary, such innovations reinforce the centrality of the prison sentence today and the inquisitoriality of our system. Starting especially from cases related to drug criminalization, the ethnographic research observed more than 150 hearings, between the years 2018 and 2020. The two main results are: i) the custody hearings did not create a space for listening to the defendant, or that is, the so-called orality of the defendant; ii) the presence of the incriminated person before the operators does not necessarily allow the visualization of possible practices not consistent with the legal form of arrest in flagrante delicto. Therefore, the orality, universality and prevention of torture – founding and legitimizing principles of this form of justice in Brazil – were left aside by the hegemony of the content of the inquisitoriality and centrality of the prison sentence within the criminal justice system. Which, therefore, reproduces a “new” legal form as hierarchical, non-oral and non-universal.