2 Brazilian police receive long sentences for 2005 massacre of 29 outside Rio de Janeiro

Brazil: Judge sentences 2 police in 2005 massacre

BRASILIA, Brazil — Two former police officers were sentenced Wednesday to roughly 500 years in prison each in the 2005 killing of 29 people outside Rio, a massacre that raised fears of death squad activity in Brazil.

Judge Elizabeth Louro sentenced ex-officer Julio Cesar de Paula to 480 years in prison and Marcos Siqueira Costa to 543 years for homicide and belonging to a criminal organization. The length of the sentences was largely symbolic because under Brazilian law no one can serve more than 30 years in prison.

A statement from Rio’s Tribunal of Justice said the men were found guilty by a jury after two days of hearings.

The ex-police officers joined three other former colleagues already sentenced to long terms in the case, which was dubbed the Baixada massacre after Rio de Janeiro’s poor northern outskirts where prosecutors say a group of police officers fired on pedestrians, bar patrons and a crowd in a public square in 2005.

Louro, when reading the sentence, called the killings “crimes, that with their barbarous details, shocked not only the communities where they took place but Brazilian society as a whole.”

Lawyers for the defendants said they would ask for the sentences to be annulled because evidence was improperly presented that it rendered the trial unfair.

Rio is one of the world’s most violent cities. Death squads, often formed by off-duty police, allegedly act as vigilante groups, eliminating criminals and “undesirables,” often at the behest of local merchants.