The Guimarães Court of Appeal gave reason to a woman, born in Braga, who had been sentenced, on July 15, 2019, to four years and four months in prison by the Braga Court for the crime of drug trafficking.
Sofia Fisher Rodrigues Cruz was detained by the GNR in October 2017, when she arrived at her home, at Rua Calouste Gulbenkian, in São Victor, Braga, accused of drug trafficking, in an operation that had made three more detainees.
The defendant was involved in a police mega-operation to dismantle a trafficking network that operated in Braga, Porto, Gaia and even in the Paços de Ferreira chain.
In his villa, six shotguns were seized, in addition to 1,380 ammunition and three boxes of gunpowder, but it came to be proven that they were left as an inheritance by the father, husband of Hannelore Fischer Cruz, recently news for having died victim of covid-19.
Sofia confessed that, between July and October 2017, she helped “Pêras”, a well-known drug dealer in Braga, in exchange for cocaine for consumption, but without ever having profited financially from the cooperation in which she was involved. Even so, she was placed in preventive detention for 10 months.
Since the first moment, as reported by MINHO in 2018, the defendant denied any involvement in the illicit business, assuming a drug use problem, something that has been proven, and is, however, recovered.
After 10 months in pre-trial detention, she was returned to freedom pending trial, but the sentence, although suspended, was enacted on the basis of an article condemning drug trafficking for profit.
In the appeal decision brought by Sofia Fischer Cruz, to which MINHO had access, dated March 23, 2020, the penal section of Relationship she considered it “of greater and more elementary justice” to reduce the sentence for not having proven that the woman profited from the drug sale business, being only a consumer.
The court in Guimarães pointed out two different articles, one for “the one who traffics to consume” and the “one who traffics to enrich and earn money without being a consumer”, and the defendant was condemned by the second point, when she would only be a consumer.
He also mentions that it was taken for granted that his intervention in the business, however “wide” it was, “it was always in the sense of obtaining more drugs to consume”.
The defense lawyers thus asked for a single sentence of 4 years, with the possibility of it being reduced to one fifth because the defendant “showed sincere regret, collaborated with the justice, had an exemplary post-fact conduct and also because of the fact that for having proven that she was a consumer as well as for having proven that the counterpart she had was cocaine for her own consumption ”.
Indemnity
MINHO spoke to Sofia Fischer Cruz about her search for justice for the time she was confined in a prison in Matosinhos in seclusion. It ensures that it will submit a request for compensation to the Portuguese court, not only to recover its good name, but for all the consequences at the family, social and professional level that the detention entailed.
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