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Judicial Discretion. Custody Hearing. Women. Mothers Drug Trafficking.
The Custody Hearing is an important step on the path to strengthening justice in the country, which together with other measures, aim to reduce preventive detention, helping to leave behind the myth of increasing sentences as an effective way to combat crime. However, there are several problems that must be addressed: preventive detention continues to be applied in just over 50% of cases, which means that preventive detention continues to be the rule and not the exception, thus violating inter-American norms; Judges continue to adopt an excessively punitive approach, and the use of this measure must be strictly exceptional, and its application must be in accordance with the principles of legality, presumption of innocence, reasonableness, necessity and proportionality. The judge is responsible for ensuring this is recognized and effective. To decide whether the legislator's actions are valid or invalid, he must explain the statements of the Constitution. However, the democratic regime in Brazil is undermined by the lack of integrity and legal coherence in the decisions of judges who did not understand that the role of the judge in a Democratic State of Law is not the same as that of the Praetor in ancient Rome. In this sense, the judge poses a serious problem, unfortunately increasingly common these days, especially in the context of criminal law and Custody Hearings, which consists of the multiplication of generic, superficial and unfounded decisions, resulting in incalculable consequences for those who receives the court verdict, often the most vulnerable part of the process. The objective of this study is to analyze judicial discretion in the face of different interpretative possibilities in custody hearings of women mothers accused of the crime of drug trafficking in the District of Macapá-AP in the year 2022. This is an investigation with a qualitative approach, which adopted the legal-exploratory method, of the documentary and exploratory type. When analyzing judicial discretion in custody hearings of women mothers studied, I conclude that, in most decisions, the judge adopted both the etiological paradigm of criminology and his personal moral desires and motivations as motivators in his decisions, allowing these to directly interfere in the decision-making process.