Blog do Paulinho journalist may be arrested for offending former magistrate

The offense against a former Paraná magistrate can lead to prison sports journalist Paulo Cezar Prado, 50, author of Blog do Paulinho. Convicted of defamation, he was denied habeas corpus by Minister Kassio Nunes Marques, of the Federal Supreme Court (STF), and is awaiting analysis of an appeal by the 2nd Panel of the court.

As the appeal to the Supreme Court does not have suspensive effect, the journalist can be arrested at any time.

The case began in 2017, when lawyer Ivan Xavier Vianna Filho, a former judge in the state, sued the journalist after being called an “alleged orange” by businessman Mário Celso Petraglia, president of Athletico Paranaense, in a report published on the top hat. .

Paulo says that he learned about the process at the end of 2018, when he had his preventive detention decreed while he was serving time in Tremembé for another process. At the time, he says that he was taken out of the semi-open regime and sent to the closed one, where he remained for 16 days, until he was released on a habeas corpus.

Despite the retraction published spontaneously on the blog and another apology during the hearing, the journalist was sentenced in March 2020 to six months in prison by Judge Cesar Maranhão de Loyola Furtado, of the 7th Criminal Court of Curitiba, of TJ-PR. (Court of Justice of Paraná).

Added to the aggravating factors, the penalty was 1 year, 6 months and 20 days.

The decision was upheld by the second instance, which reduced the days of fines and raised the fees that must be paid by the journalist, from 360 days fines and R$2,000 in fees to 26 days fines and R$15,000.

With his own resources, Paulo still appealed to higher courts, also without success. It was at this stage that international organizations defending freedom of expression offered to help him, and the journalist started to be defended by the office Flora, Matheus e Mangabeira, specialized in the subject.

The bank also started to be financed by Tornavoz, an association that subsidizes the defense of people prosecuted in the exercise of freedom of expression.

“It is a discussion that is very relevant to us, mainly because there is a criminal punishment in relation to the journalist’s conduct”, says lawyer Charlene Nagae, who emphasizes that there is a debate not only in Brazil about whether this is the correct way to these cases.

Lawyer Diogo Flora, who defends Paulo, emphasizes that the main points that the defense raises are the journalist’s right to describe the facts, according to the documents he had in hand, and that Paulo did not intend to offend, so much so that for two sometimes portrayed.

“It seems to me that this process started to end in conviction, because the retraction was not accepted and a journalist was convicted for calling a person an orange.”

“Brazil is one of the only civilized places in the world where crimes against honor are punished. Generally, when honor is affected, you seek compensation in the civil sphere. Using criminal law for this, in addition to not helping at all to combat this type of crime, it is a very big violence against the people who are subjected to this penalty.”

The lawyer adds that Paulo has already responded to several lawsuits due to allegations of corruption made on his blog, created in 2006. In the civil area alone, there are about 30 lawsuits still pending, which characterizes a context of judicial harassment, according to him.

In the criminal sphere, the journalist has already been arrested three times, all of them for offense to honor and with sentences of less than 1 year, always in a semi-open regime, which by law could have been converted into other educational measures.

Paul claims that this did not happen in his case.

In 2015, the first time he was sent to the Tremembé Penitentiary Complex, he says that he spent days in solitary confinement, without the right to visit and with a cold bath in the middle of winter.

Even sentenced to just over 5 months in prison, he claims to have seen notorious prisoners there, such as the Cravinhos brothers and Alexandre Nardoni.

In 2018, he claims that the woman took a tie and was even arrested along with him, for contempt after receiving yet another arrest warrant. In the last period held, in 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, he says that he went a month without receiving visits.

“I really like what I’ve been doing for almost 16 years. I publish a lot of stuff that doesn’t come out anywhere, especially in relation to sports. The only bad thing is that there’s that feeling of always having a sword at your neck. It’s been a while I have this feeling since 2015”, he says.

Paulo says that the impact of prison on his family also left him shaken and that prison periods also harm his career.

Living on rent, he says he had to sell the car he used to run app races and supplement his income to pay for the losses of a new prison, which he considers very difficult to avoid.