The helpless defense: Notes on the role of Brazilian public defenders in sentence enforcement proceedings

AbstractThe article exposes and analyzes the potentialities and limits of the activities of public defenders who work in Brazilian criminal sentence enforcement courts. It is the result of a work of systematization of different research experiences carried out in recent years: an ethnographic research with the Public Defender's Office of S ão Paulo and a documentary research on criminal sentence enforcement proceedings in the state of Rio de Janeiro. After making some general considerations about the role of public legal assistance in the Brazilian criminal justice system, the article explores the role of public defenders in some key moments of a sentence enforcement process: in the elaboration of a request of benefit; in the inspection of procedural records; in the monitoring of the processing time of the court; and, finally, in the defense at administrative processes of disciplinary infractions. In all those situations it is possible to perceive the aporetic or paradoxical character of the public defenders’ operations. On the one hand, their intervention in sentence enforcement proceedings appears to be absolutely essential, triggering the rights and benefits that make the prison population flow through the prisons in Brazil. On the other hand, public defenders appear as agents that are absolutely powerless, if not entirely useless, because they are incapable of making the justice system observe, in due course, the most ordinary subjective rights of a convict.
Source: Crime, Law and Social Change - Category: Criminology Source Type: research