Covid CPI senators criticize conviction of lawyer for Prevent doctors

For senators of the Covid CPI, the court decision that condemned lawyer Bruna Mendes dos Santos Moratos to pay BRL 300,000 for moral damages to Prevent Senior is “absurd”, incompatible with reality” and “unprecedented”.

As a representative of doctors who had left the operator, the defender told parliamentarians that Prevent subjected hospitalized patients with Covid to experiments with drugs of unproven effectiveness and harassed and threatened its professionals, among other complaints.

Judge Gustavo Coube de Carvalho, of the 5th Civil Court of São Paulo, however, concluded that the defender did not present evidence to support her accusations against the company. The decision was revealed by the column.

“Without that, the defendant’s conduct proved to be illicit and can be qualified as an attempt to assassinate the reputation of a large company,” he wrote.

“The moral damage resulting from this is evident, in addition to being demonstrated by the great repercussion, in the press and social media, of the offenses and accusations propagated”, continued the magistrate in the decision.

Carvalho also stated that the lawyer’s statements “are far from characterizing freedom of expression”, since, without evidence, “the defendant attributed to the company defamatory conduct defined as a crime”. According to the magistrate, the conviction has “the double objective of mitigating the damage and discouraging the repetition of the conduct”.

In a joint note, the senators who were part of the Covid CPI claim that they received the sentence with dismay, show solidarity with the lawyer and make an appeal for the decision to be reformed.

The document is signed by senators Omar Aziz (PSD-AM), Renan Calheiros (MDB-AL) and Randolfe Rodrigues (Rede-AP), who were part of the CPI summit, in addition to Humberto Costa (PT-PE), Rogério Carvalho ( PT-SE), Otto Alencar (PSD-BA), Eliziane Gama (PSD-MA), Zenaide Maia (PSD-RN) and Leila Barros (PDT-DF).

“It is, pardon the hyperbole, certainly a condemnation in quantity without precedent in the heart of the country’s jurisprudence, which is so concerned with what it calls the ‘industry of moral damage’”, they say.

“It is distressing to observe how those who fulfilled their civic duty to report are being condemned, while those responsible for the conduct of the Prevent Senior operator have not been properly prosecuted, despite the robustness of the evidence that was unveiled by the CPI of the Pandemic and that appear in the report of the Senator Renan Calheiros”, follow.

Without naming names, the signatories claim that members of the Judiciary would not have had the same impetus to consider the allegations of crimes allegedly committed by Prevent Senior and by the government of former President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) during the health crisis.

“We are absolutely certain that Justice will prevail and that the Judiciary, within the strict limits of due legal process, will proceed to reform the absurd condemnation decision. As the CPI well demonstrated, the one who should be condemned is not the lawyer Bruna, but the party that litigates against her”, they point out.

The Covid CPI operated in the Senate between April and October 2021, attracting great attention from public opinion during the pandemic. Their sessions became media and social media successes, with revelations, arguments, jokes and even arrest.

The commission’s final report recommended the indictment of 78 people, including Jair Bolsonaro, his children, government ministers, parliamentarians and doctors. The CPI has become one of the main counterpoints to the denialist practices and discourses adopted by management during the pandemic.

In recent months, however, the Attorney General’s Office has shelved investigations derived from the commission. As a justification, he pointed out the lack of evidence that would justify the presentation of a complaint.

* With information from Folha de São Paulo

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