Rui Pinto case: Judge accuses prosecutors of ‘disdain’ for court | OneFootball

The presiding judge of the panel that, in April, acquitted the “hacker” Rui Pinto of 241 crimes held this week that the Public Prosecutor’s Office had shown “disregard” for the court by filing an appeal with the same date as another one that had already been rejected by the judges.

On 11 June, Judge Tânia Loureiro Gomes had rejected the appeal by prosecutors Vera Camacho and André Ribeiro da Silva, filed on 1 June, considering it out of time, since another appeal was simultaneously pending before the Constitutional Court. That appeal would later be dismissed, with the decision becoming final on 12 June.

Even so, on 22 June the prosecutors again insisted on appealing to the Lisbon Court of Appeal, but kept the date as 1 June, “that is,” the judge wrote, “without having introduced any modification whatsoever to the text” that had already been rejected.

“Such procedural conduct does not go unnoticed by the court, given the disregard shown,” the judge added, while nevertheless admitting the appeal, although she considered its date “irregular.”

In challenging Rui Pinto’s acquittal, the prosecutors argued that the court appeared to have started from “a deeply distrustful view of the Public Prosecutor’s Office’s actions.”

The judges’ alleged distrust was related — 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 carried out by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which had already led to a first conviction of the “hacker” to a four-year suspended sentence. For judges Tânia Loureiro, Catarina Cortez Silva and João Rodrigues, the Public Prosecutor’s Office appears to have adopted a kind of criminal persecution of Rui Pinto, unjustified in the panel’s view.

“What is at issue 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, and of the fundamental right to effective judicial protection, reflected in the right to obtain a decision within a reasonable time and through a fair process,” they stated.

It is especially this argument that the Public Prosecutor’s Office is seeking to counter in its appeal to the Lisbon Court of Appeal, ultimately asking the appellate judges to have the court of first instance redo the ruling. The prosecutors argue that the judges erred in considering “the separation of proceedings carried out (…) unconstitutional, since it was legally justified, necessary and proportionate, given the concrete procedural constraints of the case.”

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