How I Tried to Kill the President

This is a real autobiographic story. No it is not the confession of a crime. How so the author tried to kill the President and did not commit a crime? Simple: By criminally suing the President for a crime punishable with death penalty. No, the author did not ask the Public Attorney to do so. The author sued himself the President and two of his ministers. This might sound strange for many people. Yes it is. However, in 1988, Brazil promulged a new constitution and the deputies that wrote it put in the items of article 5 – which list the individual rights of people – the following command:

LIX - private lawsuit shall be admitted in crimes of public lawsuit, if this is not filed within the legal term;

For those who are not familiar with law jargon: Almost all crimes are of public lawsuit type, i.e. only the public attorney can start the lawsuit. However, this constitutional command allows a citizen to start the lawsuit that normally only the public attorney could do, if he, after having everything he needs to start the lawsuit, fails to do that within the legal term which for almost all crimes (very few exceptions) is 5 days if the defendant is arrested or 15 days otherwise. I believe those who wrote this did not understand what they did. Brazilian law allows a citizen to start a public criminal lawsuit but with a lot of restrictions. Once this was included in the constitution all of those restrictions became unconstitutional, since the highest law states this is a civil right and the restrictions are not mentioned there. Not even indirectly by mentioning the law. For more details on how the author did so, read this book that tells only the first part of the story. But it is enough to describe what is probably one of the most bizarre lawsuits that ever happened.