The Rio de Janeiro Court of Justice (TJ-RJ) has recommended that state judges urgently reassess cases in which defendants were arrested on the basis of photographic recognition alone.
The recommendation was made this month by the judge Marcus Henrique Pinto Basílio, second vice president of the TJ-RJ.
The text is based on the understanding of the Superior Court of Justice (STJ), which stipulated that the recognition of a suspect in a crime through a photo cannot be used as evidence in criminal proceedings.
In September 2021, the CNN showed the case of a black man who was imprisoned for five days after being recognized by a three-by-four photograph taken 14 years ago. Jeferson Pereira da Silva, 29, was arrested after an anonymous tip informed him that he stole a cell phone and R$5 in February 2019.
A study by the Public Defender’s Office of Rio de Janeiro analyzed failures in arrests made based on photographic recognition and identified that, in most cases, the errors involve black people, who represent 81% of the 90 unjust arrests for image recognition between 2012 and 2020.
For Lucia Helena Oliveira, coordinator of Criminal Defense at the Public Defender’s Office in Rio, the TJ-RJ’s recommendation comes at a time when society understood that photographic recognition unfairly leads many people to jail.
“There is a racial component in the formulation of suspect albums. Why is a photo included in these police station records? And once a person is considered a suspect, will he be a suspect forever?”
Reference: CNN Brasil
