Praetors condemning the caste? : the performance of brazilian Supreme Court in the judgment of the "Privileged Forum"

• Autor(a) principal: Gomes Neto, José Mario Wanderley
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Carvalho, Ernani
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista de Estudos Empíricos em Direito
• Texto Completo: https://reedrevista.org/reed/article/view/524
• topic: Brazilian Supreme Court; Criminal actions; Privileged forum; Selectivity; Self-restraint; Empirical Analysis; Supremo Tribunal Federal; Ações penais originárias; Foro privilegiado; Seletividade; Autorrestrição; Análise empírica

How does the Brazilian Supreme Court (STF) behave, when invested in the role of first instance court for the judgment of original criminal actions? The hypotheses of the jurisdiction for the prerogative of function, also known by the expression “privileged forum”, although occasionally present in a group of countries, are a phenomenon associated with institutional designs originating from democratic transitions, notably the Latin American Constitutions. In Brazil, they gained notoriety after the judgment of criminal action No. 470, resulting from the scandal of the “mensalão”, in which several actors of the Executive and Legislative were condemned, due to illicit conduct, previously practiced during the exercise of their elective mandate and/or civil service in the highest decision-making spheres. Based on the assumptions that the Supreme Court is selective in the processes it leads to trial and that it often opts for self-restricted conduct, especially in situations that escape the strict exercise of judicial review, this research is dedicated to the empirical understanding of this phenomenon, through the analysis of original data, encoded from public information available on the website of the STFt, testing probable associative relationships between the conduct of the judges and the characteristics of the criminal proceedings. As a result, it was possible to observe the predominance of a self-preservation strategy using selectivity patterns, within which there is behavioral (decision-making) variation as some factors vary.