Justice delayed is justice denied, goes the legal maxim, and that has all too often been the case in Latin America.
The following in an excerpt of a CPJ blog post by Andrew Downie, CPJ Brazil Correspondent:
Justice delayed is justice denied, goes the legal maxim, and that has all too often been the case in Latin America. But the perseverance of lawyers and prosecutors in Brazil has resulted in a number of recent convictions in cases many thought had been buried or forgotten.
Rio de Janeiro police arrested four people in November in connection with the 2013 murder of José Roberto Ornelas de Lemos, the administrative director of the daily Hora H. Last year, judges in Minas Gerais state convicted Alessandro Neves Augusto for the 2013 murders of a journalist and a freelance photographer who worked together covering cases in which police were suspected of involvement in murders in and around the town of Coronel Fabriciano. And the killer of political journalist and blogger Décio Sá was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2014, two years after the murder in the impoverished northern state of Maranhão. His accomplice was sentenced to 18 years and three months for transporting the gunman to and from the crime scene.
Read the full post on CPJ’s site.