"The incarceration of mothers with children and pregnant women: analysis of the reasoning presented by the Court of Justice of the State of São Paulo to except the legal and jurisprudential frameworks when imposing pre-trial detentions, after the judgment of the HC 143.641/SP by the Brazilian Supreme Court".
imprisonment of women with children; gender stereotypes; house arrest; crime of drug trafficking
This research aims to analyze the reasoning used by the Court of Justice of São Paulo on its rulings in habeas corpus - HC in 2018, in which the legality of provisional detentions of expecting ladies and women with children, served inside correctional facilities, was judged, after the Brazilian Supreme Court’s decision in the HC 143.641/SP. The research was done in two phases. First, from a quantitative and qualitative analysis, judgments were selected by the criteria of (a) rejection and (b) disregard of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence established in the HC 143.641/SP. 424 rulings were selected. In that universe, the main reasons to deny the substitution of pre-trial custody for house arrest of mothers and pregnant women, even after the aforementioned habeas corpus was granted by the STF, were identified. Then, the judgments’ argumentative pattern was drawn in order to identify any gender stereotypes articulated on those rulings. This study concludes that there was partial resistance in adopting the house arrest of expecting ladies and mothers of children or teenagers with disabilities, and that the breadth of the expression “very exceptional cases”, used by the Supreme Court, weakened its own ruling, since it led to to the indiscriminate use of reasons alien to the rationality of the article Brazilian Criminal Procedure Code’s article 318 and unrelated to the premises settled in the aforementioned habeas corpus’s ruling, as well as gave room to the attribution of moral judgments and gender stereotypes on the grounds of deciding.