Capital punishment in Brazil

The last execution of a free man was, according to official records, of José Pereira de Sousa, in Santa Luzia, Goiás.

[1] The 1937 Constitution, which ruled the country during Getúlio Vargas' Estado Novo dictatorship, made it possible for the Justice to sentence prisoners to death for crimes beyond military offenses in wartime.

According to popular belief, integralist writer Gerardo Mello Mourão would have been sentenced to death in 1942 under the accusation of committing espionage for the Axis powers.

As such, Teodomiro Romeiro dos Santos, a militant of the Brazilian Revolutionary Communist Party, was sentenced to death under the accusation of shooting an Air Force sergeant, who died, and a Federal Police officer, who was injured.

[5] The Military Penal Code advises that this penalty should be sentenced only in extreme cases, and that the president may grant a pardon for the convicted officer.

[8] Brazil is a State Party to the Protocol of the American Convention on Human Rights to Abolish the Death Penalty, which was ratified on August 13, 1996.

According to international law, the "application of the death penalty in time of war pursuant to a conviction for a serious crime of a military nature committed during wartime" is admissible.

Datafolha, a polling institute linked to the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper, has conducted an annual survey since the early 1990s regarding the acceptance of the death penalty in Brazilian society.

[9][10] The results are similar to a 2000 poll conducted by the same institute, when approval of the death penalty had an abrupt drop, only to rise up again in subsequent years.

[9] The newspaper indicates that murder cases widely explored by the mass media during the time of the survey, such as the death of boy João Hélio (which also opened a debate on the criminal responsibility age), may influence the outcome of the polls.