Due to similarity in appearance, the report is used to incriminate the 8/1 prisoner

A comparative image report issued by the Technical-Scientific Directorate of the Federal Police (Ditec) and the National Institute of Criminalistics (INC) was mistakenly used to aggravate allegations against a man arrested in the camp in front of the Army Headquarters, in Brasília, in the acts of January 8, 2023. The only similarity confirmed by the expertise was the “contour of the ears”, which shows that the images evaluated do not represent the same person.

However, the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) accepted the report as “proof” that the defendant was inside the Palácio do Planalto during the actions on January 8, and sent a request to the Federal Supreme Court (STF) to attribute five new crimes against him. The request received a favorable vote from the reporting minister, Alexandre de Moraes, who was accompanied by seven other ministers in the vote that ended on February 23.

“But I didn’t enter any public building and the report itself shows that it’s not me in the images, so how can they report me for these crimes that can lead to up to 17 years in prison?”, asks Daniel Luciano Bressan, from Paraná, who is now responsible for violent abolition of the Democratic Rule of Law, coup d’état, armed criminal association, qualified damage and deterioration of Union heritage.

According to the document from the Public Prosecutor’s Office that requested the addition of these crimes to Bressan’s complaint, Federal Criminal Expertise Report No. 1616/2023 “identified the accused through a Facial Comparison Exam”. Therefore, the complaint states that he “was actually on the premises of Palácio do Planalto, actively participating and competing with other agents to destroy the furniture”, says the text.

However, the “evidence” against Bressan was used in a way contrary to what it actually represents. “The report did not identify this boy”, points out the doctor in Criminal Procedural Law, Gustavo Henrique Badaró. “They are distorting, either by error or bad faith, this report”, he continues.

“They are misrepresenting, either by error or bad faith, this report”, points out the doctor in Criminal Procedural Law, Gustavo Henrique Badaró

According to the expert, who had access to the expert document and the complaint filed by the Strategic Group to Combat Anti-Democratic Acts of the PGR, “the result of the report was not positive, in the sense that it was very or very likely that it was the same person, but it was below zero, weakening this hypothesis.”

What does the Federal Criminal Expertise Report say about Bressan?

The expert analysis — dated June 2023 — was signed by criminal experts Antônio Scarpelli and Ronaldo Rodrigues da Silva. The document compares photos of Bressan, taken by the PF at the time of his arrest, on January 9, 2023, with images of a person recorded by the internal camera circuit of the Palácio do Planalto the previous day.

The images show the individual walking through the building for seven minutes. He was wearing a yellow t-shirt with green diagonal stripes, jeans, dark shoes and wearing prescription glasses, as he walked up the building’s ramp, crossed the main hall and some stairs, without talking to other people or damaging anything. The man also protects his mouth and nose at times.

From this recording, the facial recognition and morphological analysis systems — which use a 512-dimensional vector for comparisons and have a performance rate rated at 99.82%, according to the report itself — cropped his face to compare it to the photos by Bressan.

This analysis pointed out differences in the faces in relation to the “hair line, forehead shape and eyebrow design”. The only similarity perceived by the systems was in the “ear contour”, which led to the conclusion that “the results obtained slightly weaken the hypothesis” that the man from Paraná was the man in the images.

So, “if the report says that there is less chance of it being the person, obviously this is insufficient for a criminal conviction and even for a precautionary measure in relation to authorship”, points out Gustavo Badaró, who is a professor of Law at the University of São Paulo (USP).

Report weakens hypothesis that the man in the images is Bressan

According to him, reports like this use a scale of -4 to +4 to indicate whether the images evaluated feature the same person. On this scale, the number zero shows that the analysis neither weakens nor strengthens the hypothesis presented, while the other levels, up and down, show the degrees of weakening or strengthening of the suspicion.

“There is a level at which the result slightly strengthens the hypothesis, strengthens it a little, strengthens it a lot or strengthens it very much, and the same in relation to weakening”, explains Badaró, citing that the report referring to Bressan presented an assessment of -1, which reduces the possibility of him being the person in the images.

Furthermore, the expert highlights that there is no other proof that Bressan entered the Palácio do Planalto. “The only element is that he was arrested for a ‘flagrant crime’ for being in the barracks camp the following day, January 9th”, he points out. “But this is insufficient to place him as part of the ‘nucleus of executors of material acts’ [invasões] and destruction of property at Palácio do Planalto, Congress and STF”, he adds.

Other details indicate that Daniel Bressan did not enter Planalto

According to Bressan’s defense, other details are also visible to the naked eye in the photos evaluated, such as the accused’s hair being thicker, both wearing different model glasses, and the accused having a mole on his forehead, which does not appear in the circuit images. internal cameras.

Furthermore, the 37-year-old salesman was photographed on January 8 by friends outside the buildings wearing a camouflage t-shirt, denim shorts and boots. “So, there is no possibility of the individual recorded on the cameras being the one accused”, points out lawyer Ezequiel Silveira, stating that, “if he did not enter the Palácio do Planalto, it is impossible for him to have committed the crimes he is accused of”.

“We are facing a generic accusation that the accused had, ‘using violence and serious threats’, tried to abolish the Democratic Rule of Law, but there is no photo, video or any other record that proves that he committed any of these acts” , says Silveira, citing yet another accusation present in the complaint.

According to the document, “protesters would be making publications on social networks questioning the fairness of the Brazilian electoral and democratic system”, which, according to the lawyer, is not a crime. “As far as we know, the verb ‘question’ is not elementary of any criminal type in the Brazilian legal system”, he points out.

Who is Daniel Luciano Bressan?

A resident of the city of Jussara, in Paraná, Bressan lives with his 89-year-old grandfather and worked as a sales consultant before being arrested on January 9, 2023. “Today, due to the ankle bracelet, I am doing odd jobs as a helper. bricklayer, with debts and at risk of losing my financed car”, he says.

According to him, his arrival in Brasília was around 4am on January 8th, so he didn’t have time to camp at the HQ. “I just entered the camp area and, around 1 pm, I went up with the people from the march.” At Praça dos Três Poderes, he took a photo near the water mirror and decided to return to the barracks due to the arrival of the helicopters. “Early the next day, we were ordered to vacate.”

Bressan spent 67 days in prison at the Papuda Penitentiary Complex, and claims that they were the worst days of his life. “I suffered terrible humiliations and lost 19 kilos from starving in that place”, he says, stating that, if convicted, he will not return to prison. “I did not commit any crime, and my conscience is clear”, he concludes.