(Reuters) – The legal team representing former soccer star Robinho has submitted a request to Brazil’s Supreme Court in an effort to prevent his immediate arrest following a recent court ruling mandating his nine-year prison sentence for rape be served in Brazil.
In the request, his attorneys, who have previously represented him during his time playing for Santos, Manchester City, Real Madrid, and AC Milan, asked for a temporary injunction to halt the previous decision made by the country’s highest court for matters unrelated to the constitution, which mandated that he begin serving his sentence without delay.
A court in Milan, Italy, in 2017 convicted Robinho and five other individuals from Brazil of gang raping a 22-year-old Albanian woman after allegedly getting her intoxicated in a nightclub in 2013. This conviction was later upheld by an appeals court in 2020 and affirmed by Italy’s Supreme Court in 2022.
The Brazilian court did not revisit the specifics of the rape conviction itself, instead focusing solely on the validity of the sentence imposed in Italy being upheld in Brazil.
Throughout the process of confirming the Italian court’s decision, Robinho, born Robson de Souza, remained at liberty and, according to his legal team, “has never posed any threat to the enforcement of national laws, therefore, his freedom should be maintained until a final ruling is reached on the matter.”
The defense team contended that the recent decision goes against established legal precedents set forth by the Supreme Court, which historically dictates that a defendant only be incarcerated following the exhaustion of all available avenues for appeals, further asserting that forcing the former soccer sensation to serve his sentence in his home country “blatantly contradicts the principles outlined in the Republic’s Constitution.”
They also cited that, at the time of the alleged crime, there were no specific Brazilian laws in place dictating how sentences from foreign jurisdictions should be enforced, and that retroactively applying such laws to Robinho would be unjust.
(Reporting by Ricardo Brito; Writing by Peter Frontini; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
