The Fifth Class of the Superior Court of Justice (STJ) decided, this Tuesday (6), unanimously, to reduce the sentences of three convicted in the case that became known as the Unaí massacre.
In January 2004, four employees of the Ministry of Labor and Employment were killed in Unaí in an ambush during a routine inspection of farms. The servers were investigating alleged work in a regime analogous to slavery in the place.
The appeals rapporteur, Minister Ribeiro Dantas, denied the request for annulment of the juries that sentenced the defendants Norberto Mânica, José Alberto Castro and Hugo Alves Pimenta, but rejected the so-called qualifier that made the penalty harder (qualifiers are elements in a crime that fits him into a more serious criminal offense).
“The only impact of exclusion from the qualifier will be the reduction of the sentence, a measure that is up to the court itself and not to the jurors”, said the minister.
One of the defendants, Norberto Manica, had been sentenced to more than 98 years by the jury. The sentence had already been reduced to 65 years by the Federal Regional Court of the 1st Region and has now been reduced to just over 56 years.
The other two defendants (José Alberto Castro and Hugo Alves Pimenta) also had their sentences reduced to 41 years and 27 years, respectively. The two had initially been sentenced to more than 90 years in prison by the jury.
Source: CNN Brasil
