Tribunal da Relação do Porto Seals Fernando Valente's Acquittal in the Grávida da Murtosa Case — Double-Conformity Rule Closes the Supremo Tribunal de Justiça Appeal Door Three Years After Mónica Silva's Disappearance

The Tribunal da Relação do Porto (Court of Appeal of Porto) handed down on 11 June 2026 the appellate decision that closes one of the most-followed Portuguese criminal-justice cases of the past three years, confirming in full the September 2025 acquittal pronounced by the Tribunal do Júri (Jury Court) of Aveiro against Fernando Valente, the sole defendant indicted in the disappearance and presumed homicide of Mónica Silva — the Murtosa resident who vanished in 2023 while pregnant. The five-judge appellate panel rejected as not well-founded both appeals filed against the original acquittal: the appeal brought by the Ministério Público (Public Prosecutor's Office) and the parallel appeal brought by Mónica Silva's family acting as assistente (private assistant to the prosecution).

The legal consequence the decision triggers is the formal sealing of the case under the dupla conforme (double-conformity) rule of Article 400 of the Código de Processo Penal (CPP — Criminal Procedure Code). Under that rule, where a first-instance acquittal is confirmed by the Relação on appeal, no further recurso ordinário (ordinary appeal) to the Supremo Tribunal de Justiça (STJ — Supreme Court of Justice) is admissible. The Valente acquittal is therefore final on the merits as of the 11 June ruling, with the only residual judicial route being an extraordinary recurso de revisão (review on new evidence) under Article 449 of the CPP — a high-bar procedure that requires post-trial evidence sufficient to overturn the original judgment, not merely a different reading of the trial record.

The substantive case against Valente had been brought across five distinct criminal counts in the September 2025 Aveiro júri trial: homicídio qualificado (qualified homicide — Article 132 of the Código Penal), aborto (abortion — Article 140), profanação de cadáver (desecration of a corpse — Article 254), acesso ilegítimo (illegal access — Article 6 of the Lei do Cibercrime) and contrafacção de moeda (counterfeiting — Article 262 of the Código Penal). The Aveiro Tribunal do Júri — the panel of professional and lay judges convened for serious criminal cases on victim or defence motion — returned a not-guilty verdict on all five counts in the original September 2025 print, finding the prosecution's evidentiary case did not clear the in dubio pro reo (benefit-of-the-doubt) threshold required for conviction.

The factual gap that anchored the acquittal is the unresolved question of what happened to Mónica Silva in May 2023. Silva — a 26-year-old Murtosa resident in the late stages of pregnancy at the time of her disappearance — vanished without trace, and despite a 30-month investigation neither her body nor any forensic remains have been recovered. The Ministério Público's prosecution theory was built on circumstantial evidence: financial transactions between Valente and Silva in the weeks before the disappearance, a partial set of digital-communications records, and a chain-of-presence narrative placing Valente at the Murtosa location shortly before the disappearance. The Aveiro júri found that body of evidence did not reach the standard of proof required to convict on qualified-homicide and related counts. The Relação's 11 June ruling does not disturb that evidentiary reading.

The procedural significance of the decision for the Portuguese criminal-justice system is meaningful beyond the Murtosa case. The Relação's confirmation of a júri acquittal under the dupla conforme rule is the second such decision in 2026 (after the May 2026 Relação de Coimbra ruling in the Pampilhosa da Serra case) and is being read by criminal-procedure academics as a consolidation signal: the Relações are not using the appeal route to override júri findings on the trial record where the lay-judge component of the panel was satisfied. The dupla conforme bar to STJ review then operates as the intended res judicata seal. The Ministério Público has been pushing through 2025-2026 for a legislative revision that would loosen the dupla conforme rule for acquittals — a proposal that sits with the Comissão de Assuntos Constitucionais, Direitos, Liberdades e Garantias at the Assembleia da República but has not advanced to a plenary vote.

For the Silva family — represented through the assistente intervention in both the trial and the appeal — the residual legal route is the recurso de revisão under Article 449, conditional on the surfacing of new evidence sufficient to overturn the acquittal. That route does not require new forensic evidence specifically (witness recantation or post-trial confession would also qualify), but the bar is substantively higher than the standard appeal threshold. The family's legal team flagged on 11 June that no specific revisão motion is currently in preparation but that any future development in the search for Silva's remains would be assessed for revisão-trigger value. The investigative case at the Polícia Judiciária remains open as a missing-persons matter even after the criminal-procedural closure on the suspect side.

What This Decision Settles — and What It Does Not

• The criminal-procedural case against Fernando Valente is closed. The dupla conforme rule of Article 400 CPP bars further ordinary appeal to the STJ. Valente leaves the case acquitted of all five indicted counts with res judicata effect.
• The disappearance investigation remains technically open. The Polícia Judiciária's missing-persons file on Mónica Silva is independent of the criminal-prosecution file and remains active. Any new forensic finding would feed into that file, not into a re-opening of the criminal case against Valente.
• The recurso de revisão route is the only residual judicial path. Article 449 CPP allows for review on new evidence — confession, witness recantation, forensic recovery — but the bar is materially higher than the standard appellate review. The Silva family's representation has not flagged a current motion.

The Tribunal da Relação do Porto rulings calendar is published at tribunalconstitucional.pt jurisprudence platform and on the Direção-Geral da Administração da Justiça's CITIUS docket; the Código de Processo Penal text is at dre.pt; the Polícia Judiciária missing-persons appeal file remains active at policiajudiciaria.pt.