Two GNR soldiers from Feira, in the district of Aveiro, will stand trial for allegedly failing to issue a traffic ticket at the request of a colleague, according to a court decision consulted today by Lusa.
A ruling by the Porto Court of Appeal (TRP), dated February 28, dismissed the appeal by the Public Prosecutor’s Office (MP) and upheld the decision of the Feira Criminal Investigation Court that sentenced the defendants to trial for one crime of abuse of power and the other of aggravated document forgery.
The two soldiers also face the additional penalty of being banned from performing their duties.
In addition to the crime of document forgery, the Public Prosecutor’s Office had charged the defendants with a crime of denial of justice, but the investigating judge ruled that the conduct they were accused of was part of a different type of crime.
The criminal acts took place on November 13, 2020, when the two soldiers, who were on patrol duty, went to a street in Santa Maria da Feira because a traffic accident had occurred there.
When they arrived at the scene, the soldiers found the damaged vehicle parked on the sidewalk, and warned the owner and his wife that a notice would have to be issued for the infraction.
In the meantime, a friend of the couple arrived at the scene who, according to the indictment, phoned a GNR corporal who also worked at the same territorial post as the defendants, and the latter contacted his colleagues, telling them not to proceed with the report, and both decided not to raise the administrative offense.
The indictment also states that in order to conceal the crime of not lifting the administrative offense they knew they were obliged to for parking on the sidewalk, one of the military defendants replaced the designation “sidewalk” with “roadside” in the sketch attached to the traffic accident report.
According to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the defendants acted “with grave abuse and serious violation of the duties of their function, jeopardizing its dignity and the community’s confidence in its fair exercise”, with the concrete purpose of agreeing to the colleague’s request and benefiting the couple, preventing them from being sentenced to pay a fine.