Chega does not give up on seeing the increase in prison sentences approved for murder crimes involving children. This Monday, he delivered a Bill to the Assembly of the Republic, for discussion and voting, which provides for an increase in the maximum prison sentence to 65 years in homicide crimes committed with special perversity, namely against children.
According to this Bill, to which the CM had access, “the Court must admit the conditional release of a person sentenced to a prison sentence of more than 25 years, after serving 15 years of sentence”, provided that the inmate meets the conditions for such, which are provided for in the law.
If the court considers “that the conditions for applying parole are not met, a new assessment must be carried out after 10 years and so on until the prison sentence is fully served”, reads André Ventura’s party project.
This is the second time, in the space of two weeks, that Chega has presented a Bill in Parliament providing for harsher penalties for particularly brutal crimes against children, such as the one that killed little Jessica, in Setúbal, who was only three years old.
In the first Bill, Chega advanced the possibility of the courts applying life imprisonment, a sentence that would be reviewed every 15 years. But the President of the Assembly of the Republic, Augusto Santos Silva, made the project unfeasible, considering that it was unconstitutional.
In the text proposing a maximum prison sentence of 65 years, Chega recalls that the maximum sentence in Portugal is 25 years, “which is never fully served.
In 2017, 93 people were sentenced to the maximum penalty, for a set of 322 crimes (therefore, there was legal overlap), which included 107 homicides, 36 violent robberies, 12 rapes, among other crimes. Even if among these people there is some who do not want any rehabilitation, who are unable to live in society, even so, after serving five-sixths of the sentence, they are released”, says Chega.
