Judge accused of assaulting mother and sister will be tried at STJ – 02/24/2023 – Frederico Vasconcelos

The Special Court of the Superior Court of Justice is due to judge this Wednesday (1st) criminal action against Judge Luís Cesar de Paula Espíndola, from the TJ of Paraná, accused of the crime of bodily injury against his mother and a sister, in 2014.

The complaint, based on the Maria da Penha Law, was received unanimously in 2018. The judge was accused of causing injuries to his sister, Maria Lucia de Paula Espíndola, and of hitting his mother, Teresa de Jesus Rodrigues de Paula Espíndola.

The magistrate had been prohibited from making contact with the sister, by any means of communication, and obliged to maintain a minimum distance of 500 meters.

The current rapporteur is Minister Paulo de Tarso Sanseverino.

In April 2022, with the Covid 19 pandemic, the defendant requested that the interrogation be carried out in person. The rapporteur granted the request.

Sanseverino recorded in an order “the procrastinating conduct” of the magistrate, with “successive alterations and expansions of the set of constituted defenders”. At the time, twelve lawyers and a dative defender had acted in sequence.

The judge was removed from office with the qualified vote of the then president, Laurita Vaz. The removal, however, was suspended by the then Minister of the STF Marco Aurélio de Mello, who ensured Espíndola’s immediate return to judicial functions.

The Attorney General’s Office had considered the motivation for removal superficial, determined only in 2018, for facts that occurred in 2013.

The previous rapporteur, Minister Napoleão Nunes Maia Filho, had judged the measure required by the then Deputy Attorney General Luciano Mariz Maia “unreasonable and disproportionate”, as the crime of injury would not result in loss of office and the alleged crime was not committed in the exercise of function.

The then Minister Jorge Mussi opened the divergence. He considered the conduct incompatible with the exercise of the magistracy. The judge was acquitted in another action, accused of assaulting a housewife with a shovel.

Maria Lúcia Espíndola, his sister, acts as assistant to the prosecution. In testimony, she said that she went to visit her parents and found her brother, who wanted to dismiss one of the mother’s caregivers, who had been nervous, as she liked the caregiver.

In his testimony, he stated that the judge punched him in the face, and “that he also punched his mother, hitting her in the eye”.

The then rapporteur, Napoleão Nunes Maia Filho, said that, “unless further investigation is carried out, the content of the dialogue is consistent with the version presented by Maria Lúcia at the Public Ministry.

Minister Raul Araújo saw no reason to consider the behavior attributed to the judge sufficient to remove him from the exercise of the magistracy.

Humberto Martins disagreed and voted for the precautionary removal: “I’ve already seen that this degree of limit of the accused is a degree of zero tolerance, because he attacks a neighbor with a shovel, the sister with punches, the mother also with violence”.

Martins defined the magistrate as an individual “with a highly aggressive, intemperate and violent temperament”.

PREVIOUS DEFENSE

In the preliminary defense, Espíndola maintained that “the mere transcriptions of partial recordings, selected and edited”, would only prove “a fierce discussion within the family” clearly provoked by the accusers, “with a tape recorder turned on to record what would help them to contest the interdictions of country”.

He alleged the ineptitude of the complaint, in view of the lack of details of the circumstances of the alleged bodily harm caused to his mother, which would make his defense impossible.

The magistrate accused the sister of writing checks “from her father’s account to herself” and alleged the disappearance of her mother’s jewelry.

He also alleged that, in retaliation for these measures, his sister would have subjected him “to a trap, on September 25, 2013, to start and record a discussion and accuse him of aggression”.

APN 835