Um repensar sobre a confissão no processo penal brasileiro: pesquisa empírica em julgados do Tribunal de Justiça de Minas Gerais

Abstract

Despite the epistemic distrust that should fall on confessions, this evidence is one of the most persuasive in criminal procedural law. An admission of guilt is very convincing to anyone, whether a layperson or even a magistrate. After all, why would an individual admit to committing a crime they didn't commit? This common notion has led to an underestimation of the occurrence of false confessions. However, scientific advances in police investigations have led to evidence of several cases of miscarriages of justice in which crimes were falsely admitted. These discoveries have prompted studies aimed at analyzing the factors that contribute to the generation of false confessions and possible solutions to mitigate this phenomenon, the main problems being identified in police interrogations. In Brazil, where there is no record of miscarriages of justice due to false confessions, it is not possible to say that they do not exist. The Brazilian legal system also has an aggravating factor: the sentencing judge is also responsible for receiving the initial accusatory statement, something that will remain after the recent interpretation of the investigation judge by the Brazilian Supreme Court. Therefore, even if the confession is retractable, the judge will have analyzed the first confession, produced out of court, under controversial conditions, psychologically contaminated by that admission of authorship. Given this, this dissertation aimed to analyze the current treatment of confessions in Brazil and to investigate proposals for improving the reliability of this piece of evidence. The hypothesis formulated is that the confession exerts enormous persuasion on the conviction of judges, and, for this reason, the Brazilian legal system lacks epistemic increments on the subject, increments that can be proposed from the interdisciplinary approach between Law and Psychology. The theoretical framework adopted consists of the adoption of contributions from epistemology in procedural law, understanding the process as an instrument designed to obtain knowledge about the truth of the facts, truth here understood as correspondence. Quantitative and qualitative empirical research was then carried out on judgments published by the Tribunal de Justiça de Minas Gerais, verifying almost 100% of convictions in cases in which there were confessions and verifying the practical non-occurrence of acquittals in cases of judicial retractions or the exercise of the right to silence in court. Pre-procedural confessions were practically always valued, even though there were allegations that the admission of guilt was involuntary. In conclusion, the hypothesis was confirmed, demonstrating that the confession is still an extremely persuasive element for judges, regardless of when it was produced, and that there are concrete proposals to make it more reliable, in favor of fairer judicial decisions.