Before Brazil’s so-called Lava Jato (“Car Wash”) Operation, almost every attempt to prosecute high-level corruption in Brazil failed. Many cases were never investigated or prosecuted, but even in those cases where prosecutors started investigations, identified crimes, and brought charges, appeals courts ended up nullifying the proceedings, often before trial, on technical grounds for failure to comply with procedural rules (see, for example, here, here, here, and here). The result was a culture of impunity, in which grand corruption thrived. The Lava Jato Operation has been hailed as a historic breakthrough not only because of the breadth of the corruption it uncovered, but also because the convictions secured by prosecutors had, by and large, been affirmed on appeal. Unfortunately, there are troubling signs that the Brazilian judiciary is reverting to its old ways. Last October, for example, the Brazilian Supreme Court issued a procedural ruling  concerning the sequence of closing arguments that the Court held required the nullification of two Lava Jato convictions (so far), and may end up doing more widespread damage. The larger issue here, though, is the double-standard that Brazilian appellate courts seem to have embraced: adopting an (excessively) stringent and unforgiving view of even minor technical procedural noncompliance in corruption cases involving elite defendants, while at the same time relying (properly) on “harmless error” doctrines to excuse similar sorts of procedural noncompliance in cases involving other sorts of crimes, such as drug trafficking. Continue reading →