Brazil’s Prosecutor General’s Office filed a complaint yesterday, Monday, before the Federal Supreme Court against the former judge and senator Sérgio Moro for claiming that one of the highest court justices was selling his sentences.
If convicted, Moro could serve a sentence for the crime of slander in prison or lose the senatorial mandate to which he was elected last year, according to a document released by the deputy attorney general of Brazil, Lindora Araújo.
In a video released on social networks, Moro appears talking to several people saying that “they can buy a ‘habeas corpus’ from Gilmar Mendes”, a judge of the Supreme Federal Court.
Mendes was the high court investigating judge that Moro, as a magistrate, was biased and committed political persecution and corruption by convicting without evidence in 2017 Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for alleged corruption and sending him to prison for 580 days.
By majority, the court overturned Lula’s conviction and considered Moro, who, after imprisoning the Workers’ Party leader, became Minister of Justice in the government of Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022), to be biased.
Moro was elected senator for the Union Brazil party last year and said his sayings against Mendes were “taken out of context.”
For the deputy attorney general, Moro accused Judge Mendes of “negotiating the buying and selling of a judicial decision for the granting of ‘habeas corpus’.”
“By falsely imputing the practice of the crime of passive corruption to the judge of the Supreme Federal Court, Gilmar Mendes, the defendant acted with the clear intention of tarnishing the image and objective honor of the offended party, trying to discredit his performance as a magistrate,” Araújo added.
The complaint was motivated by a representation made by Mendes’ lawyer after the video of Moro’s speech circulated in the press and on social networks.
The deputy attorney general requested that in case Moro is sentenced to imprisonment for more than four years, he should lose his mandate as a senator.