Extermination of black people and violation of the constitutional principle of the presumption of innocence

Abstract

Police killings in Brazil in 2020 reveal strong prejudice against black victims, urging expanded search. This article examines the presumption of innocence regarding Black individuals, evaluating its compliance and barriers in judicial contexts and as a standard of treatment. The hypothesis challenges the non-observance of this principle for pre-trial procedures for black people. Investigating through the racialized lens of the Brazilian criminal system, the principle of innocence weighs against the real and fierce experiences of black people and the role of the judiciary in combating this violence. Employing a deductive approach, it reviews doctrine and laws through SciELO, Public Domain and Google Scholar for PPGD/FDV databases. The findings expose the structural violence that erases black innocence; therefore, the sentence must be aligned with legal and factual bases. Rectifying racial disparities requires judicial research focused on combating institutionalized violence and ensuring social justice. The results show that structural violence kills black people in Brazil not only by avoiding giving them any doubt about their guilt, but also by violating the principle of presumption of innocence. If the sentence is served in advance, which is not based on legitimate legal reasons and concrete facts, the execution of the sentence will not occur. To conclude, public security is one of the fundamental fields of social and state action to correct the racial inequalities that make black people more vulnerable in Brazil. The Judiciary must conduct additional research on episodic and concrete surveys of the resulting regulation – of a norm, in order to base its convictions on an ideal of social justice to combat the institutionalized structural violence that kills black people in Brazil without giving them the benefit of the doubt.