He did not understand Czech, they took away his crutches. A German invalid has been awarded compensation for wrongful conviction and wants more

It was a case like one of Agatha Christie’s classic detective stories. Four friends from Germany came to the South Bohemian pond to enjoy fishing and alcohol. Together, they drank three bottles of vodka, a bottle of cognac and 40 beers in approximately equal measure. At night, one of the expedition ended up getting stabbed. His buddies, the entire camp and the car his friends used to take him to the hospital were covered in blood.

Who was the perpetrator when nobody remembered anything due to drunkenness? The courts eventually pointed to the then fifty-four-year-old invalid. The key was the testimony of another of the companions, who, when he found out that he was also a suspect, changed his statement and suddenly remembered that the attacker must have been an invalid.

The man was sentenced to eight years in prison, but in the end the Constitutional Court defended him. “The court could not approve the efforts of the law enforcement authorities to determine the perpetrator through the so-called exclusion method, i.e. the procedure where the perpetrator was identified as the one of the four participants in the fishing trip who was the last one left after the supposedly correct exclusion of other possibilities,” the judges stated in 2020 .

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He was without crutches, his brother and mother had died

After another trial, the invalid was acquitted and began to demand financial satisfaction for the wrongful conviction. He pointed out that he has a severe disability, and yet he could not use crutches in prison, moreover, he does not understand Czech, so it was difficult for him to communicate with anyone. During his time in prison, his family lost a large part of their income, and his brother and mother died during that time, and he did not have a chance to say goodbye to them.

The District Court for Prague 2 awarded the man an additional almost half a million crowns on top of the compensation already awarded, but the Municipal Court of Appeal in Prague rejected the higher satisfaction, among other things, stating that the disabled man himself complicated the situation by being drunk at the time of the incident.

The man then turned to the Supreme Court, and the senate headed by David Vláčil gave him the truth.

“The hypothetical conclusion that the more than four-year restriction of personal freedom in the form of forced execution of the sentence was self-inflicted by his heavy drunkenness during a fishing trip with friends seems not only legally incorrect, but – from a human point of view – also disproportionately strict,” the judges stated and returned the case before the Prague Municipal Court, which must decide on the claim again and better.