The defendant was convicted on 23 December, 2019 by the Central Criminal Court of Lisbon on a single sentence of 25 years in prison for 30 crimes of child sexual abuse and one crime of child pornography.
Three days before the judgment was read, the defendant filed a habeas corpus request, claiming that he had been in prison for longer than the law allows.
In the appeal, the defendant argued that, having been arrested on 20 June, 2017, the maximum term of two and a half years of preventive detention had already been reached, without having been convicted on the first instance.
However, the advising judges understood that the claimant is wrong, and that there was no excess of preventive detention.
“Since the defendant has been in preventive detention since 23 June, 2017, the date on which such a coercive measure was decreed, which must be considered, as an initial term, for determining the maximum duration of preventive detention, and taking into account if a condemnatory decision was issued on 23 December, 2019, it must be concluded that that period has not elapsed”, reads the judgment dated 27 December, 2019 and later posted on the Internet.
According to the indictment, the accused allegedly sexually abused eight minors, including babies, seven of them his relatives (two nephews and five cousins). He was accused of 583 crimes of child sexual abuse and 73,577 of child pornography.
The prosecution order indicated that the main defendant lived with his parents in a house in the municipality of Águeda, district of Aveiro, where his sister and brother-in-law, parents of a girl, now 7 years old, have lived since 2014. In September 2016, the couple had a second child, a boy, now almost 3 years old.
When the couple was absent, the children were entrusted to the care of the defendant or grandparents (also defendants), the residence being attended by two cousins (also defendants) and their three children - two boys aged 6 and 3 years old and a 10 month old baby.
Three other boys, aged 9, 10 and 12, also used to go to the residence, two of them also relatives of the accused.
The prosecution maintained that, at least since 2013/2014 and until June 2017, the month in which he was detained by the Judiciary Police and held in preventive detention, the accused sexually abused the minors, who were “filmed and photographed in order to later divulge and share such files with other individuals who are also viewers of child sexual abuse content”.
The MP said that at least since November 2015 the defendant created, administered and managed a ‘darknet’ (network closed to a private group of people), of an international nature, through which he disseminated films and images of sexual abuse against “mostly babies and young children”, which he called ‘Baby Heart’.