The hearings had barely begun when Judge Raynes Viana de Vasconcelos, from the 1st Criminal Execution Court in Fortaleza, Ceará, informed officials that he would suspend the agenda for that day to verify news brought up by a prisoner during his testimony.
The judge went to a prison in the city of Itaitinga, where 72 prisoners had been beaten the night before by penitentiary agents. Some of the prisoners had fractured fingers.
"A horror scene. The guys are all broken, all injured. Scandalous torture" said public defender Delano Benevides de Medeiros Filho, who was the first to spot the wounded.
The flagrant registered by the authorities of Ceará, in September 2022, confirmed the suspicions that had been haunting the state's prison system for years and that point to a possible routine of violence against prisoners, which includes a specific technique for breaking fingers, which is not exclusive to Ceará.
According to Bárbara Suelen Coloniese, an expert at the National Mechanism for the Prevention and Combat of Torture, this type of torture has also been identified in Rio Grande do Norte, Roraima, Amazonas, and Pará.
The Secretariat of the Penitentiary Administration of Ceará reported that it "repudiates any act that violates human dignity".
Translated by Cassy Dias