massacre in schools and kindergartens

Senator for Paraná Sergio Moro (União Brasil) presented a report to Bill 1880/2023, authored by Senator Efraim Filho (União Brasil-PB), which presents greater punishment for crimes in schools. The bill provides for a new legal type in the Penal Code, describing the crime of “massacre” and punishing preparatory acts for the execution of the crime. The text also criminalizes both incitement and apology for this type of crime.

Receive the main news from Paraná by WhatsApp

The senator, who is the rapporteur for the proposal, presented a report stating that approval is necessary, even more so because of the latest attacks on schools. He mentioned the recent case at a state school in Cambé, in the north of Paraná, the first occurrence of an attack by an armed attacker on a school with fatal victims in the State.

However, the parliamentarian presented some changes to the project. Among them, the modification of the expression “killing people indiscriminately” to “if the homicide is committed against more than one person, under the same circumstances and with the intention of causing social repercussions”. For the senator, it is important that the legal text allows the differentiation of a crime of massacre from another, with multiple homicides and directed at specific victims, with individual purposes.

Moro also proposed to equate the penalty for the massacre to the sanction imposed on robbery, in one measure for each victim. In addition, the senator from Paraná also increased the penalty for preparatory acts. He highlighted the importance of including the crime in the list of heinous crimes – this classification would only apply to the massacre itself, and not to the preparatory acts, as a matter of proportionality.

“In our understanding, this is a matter of priority public safety and it is up to the Public Power to implement measures that prevent attacks like these in our day care centers, schools or universities”, he said. The forecast is that the proposal will be evaluated, in a terminative way, in the Senate Constitution and Justice Committee, in the coming weeks.