Public prosecutor slams judges, 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 level several criticisms at 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 conduct”.

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 and a four-year suspended sentence. For 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 trying to counter in the appeal submitted to the Lisbon Court of Appeal, ultimately asking the appellate judges to have the lower court reassess the decision. The prosecutors argue that the judges erred in considering “the separation of the 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 the lower-court judges had stated, the Public Prosecutor’s Office insists that there was no collaboration whatsoever from Rui Pinto: “The case files show that Rui Pinto’s identification, the international measures, the seizures, the expert 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 – criticised and highlighted by the court as grounds for the 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 conduct differentiated in time, even though they were related to the same overall criminal strategy”.

“The interpretation adopted by the lower court seriously undermines the investigation of complex, organised 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 Public Prosecutor’s Office magistrates added.

Rui Pinto may still have to return to the defendant’s bench, 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.