The court found that the two charges of damage and illegal access against Cristina Rodrigues, brought by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, were not proven.
In addition to Cristina Rodrigues, the trial included another defendant, Sara Fernandes, a former employee of PAN, accused of damaging software or other computer data, in co-authorship with the current Chega deputy. Sara Fernandes was also acquitted.
The court stated that “the evidence produced was insufficient to prove that they acted in the manner described in the accusation,” the presiding judge noted.
The case involves a “computer blackout” of PAN leaders’ emails in 2020, when Cristina Rodrigues was still a deputy for the party. The Public Prosecutor considered that “the defendants acted deliberately, freely, and consciously, according to a pre-determined plan, aiming to prevent PAN and its members from accessing the content of the party’s email messages,” as stated in the accusation.
“The defendants removed thousands of email messages from the mentioned inbox, which they knew they were not authorized to do. The defendants aimed to – and succeeded in – preventing the PAN party from continuing its political activities,” the ruling reads.
In the final arguments, the Public Prosecutor did not request a specific penalty, arguing that “it is not credible that someone resigns at 10:00 AM one day and is making changes to a file at 4:00 PM the previous day.”
The Public Prosecutor argued that using “some common sense” would suffice to “conclude, without large leaps of logic, that there was a massive directory change followed by a delete operation.”
In the first session of the trial, Cristina Rodrigues denied the facts stated in the Public Prosecutor’s accusation: “For now, I only say that I reject the facts imputed to me.”
