Public Prosecutor criticises judges and appeals Rui Pinto acquittal | OneFootball

The Public Prosecutor’s Office has already filed an appeal, challenging Rui Pinto’s acquittal in April on 241 cybercrime charges. In the document, prosecutors Vera Camacho and André Ribeiro da Silva make several criticisms of the panel of judges (Tânia Loureiro, Catarina Cortez Silva and João Rodrigues), even going so far as to suggest that the court acted from “a deeply distrustful view of the Public Prosecutor’s Office’s actions”.

The judges’ alleged distrust was linked — according to the ruling that acquitted Rui Pinto in the second trial of the so-called ‘Football Leaks case’ — to the separation of the proceedings decided by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which had already led to the hacker’s first conviction, with a four-year suspended sentence. In the view of Tânia Loureiro, Catarina Cortez Silva and João Rodrigues, the Public Prosecutor’s Office had engaged in a kind of criminal persecution of Rui Pinto, something they considered unjustified.

“What is at stake are violations of the fundamental and absolute principles of human dignity and of the Portuguese Republic as a democratic state governed by the rule of law, as well as the fundamental right to effective judicial protection, expressed in the right to obtain a decision within a reasonable time and through a fair process,” they said.

It is above all this position that the Public Prosecutor’s Office is seeking to challenge in the appeal filed with the Lisbon Court of Appeal, ultimately asking the appellate judges to have the first-instance court reassess the decision. The prosecutors argue that the judges erred in deeming “the separation of proceedings carried out (…) unconstitutional, since it was legally grounded, necessary and proportionate, given the specific procedural constraints of the case”.

On the other hand, and contrary to what had been stated by the first-instance judges, the Public Prosecutor’s Office insists that Rui Pinto provided no cooperation whatsoever: “The case files show that the identification of Rui Pinto, the international procedures, the seizures, the forensic examinations and the collection of digital evidence resulted from the Judicial Police’s and the Public Prosecutor’s Office’s own investigation, and it is incorrect to claim that obtaining the evidence depended decisively on the defendant’s cooperation.”

Regarding the separation of the proceedings — criticized and highlighted by the court as grounds for acquittal — prosecutors Vera Camacho and André Ribeiro da Silva state that “the different proceedings initiated concerned distinct sets of computer intrusions, different victims, autonomous contexts and temporally differentiated conduct, although connected by the same overall criminal strategy”.

“The interpretation adopted by the lower court seriously undermines the investigation of complex, organized and cyber crime, in which the progressive discovery of new facts and victims is frequent and in which procedural separation often constitutes an indispensable tool for case management and for preserving the effectiveness of criminal prosecution,” the prosecutors added.

Rui Pinto may still return to the dock, as a third investigation is currently under way at the Central Department of Investigation and Criminal Action (DCIAP).

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇵🇹 here.