Doorman who witnessed the attack on an actor is charged with failing to provide assistance

The doorman of a building in Copacabana, in the South Zone of Rio, was charged with the crime of failing to provide assistance for failing to call the police after witnessing an attack committed by a resident of the building on the morning of last Saturday (2).

Closed-circuit footage shows medical student Yuri de Moura Alexandre, 29, at the building’s entrance throwing punches at actor Victor Meyniel, 26, whom he had met at a nightclub the night before. The aggressions are ended spontaneously by the student, who walks away leaving the actor lying on the floor. The doorman watches the whole scene without showing any reaction.

In a statement to the police, the doorman claimed to have helped the victim after the aggression and claimed to have reported the episode to the manager, who called the police.

On the other hand, the lawyer representing the actor maintains that the doorman would have limited himself to moving the victim to clear the passage of the building. After regaining consciousness, the actor received help from another resident of the building and called the police, reporting the crime to police chief Débora Rodrigues, who subsequently arrested the aggressor and charged the doorman for failing to provide assistance. The crimes attributed to the student were bodily injury, ideological falsehood and racial slurs (due to alleged homophobic insults uttered during aggression).

The crime of omitting help, imputed to the doorman, is provided for in article 135 of the Penal Code, being typified as “failing to provide assistance, when possible to do so without personal risk, to the abandoned or lost child, or to the disabled or injured person. , helpless or in serious and imminent danger; or not to ask, in these cases, for help from the public authority”. The foreseen penalty is detention for one to six months or a fine.

In the delegate’s interpretation, the doorman did not have the duty to intervene physically to repel the aggression – due to the personal risk he would incur -, but rather to call the police or the Mobile Emergency Service (Samu), or leave your post to ask a passer-by for help. According to the delegate, the fact that the doorman called the manager would be insufficient to mischaracterize the crime of failure to provide assistance.

However, according to the criminal lawyer Gabriel Druda Deveikis, it is common ground among jurists that the mere fact that a witness witnesses an occurrence without doing anything does not automatically configure the crime of omitting help – which would only occur if this resulted in the victim’s actual helplessness . From this perspective, even if the doorman did not personally call the police, the fact that someone else had taken this action in his place – the superintendent, at the instigation of the doorman himself – would rule out the crime.