Following a two-decade legal battle, a Polish court has issued a final, binding acquittal for four physicians accused of contributing to the 2006 death of Jerzy Ziobro. <\/p>\n
“Prof. Dariusz Dudek, prof. Jacek Dubiel, prof. Katarzyna Stryczkiewicz, and Dr. Andrzej Kmita are not guilty of the death of Jerzy Ziobro,” ruled the court after a 20-year battle by the Ziobro family, as described by “Wyborcza”.<\/p>\n
Out of all the defendants, only Prof. Jacek Dubiel, who headed the ward where Jerzy Ziobro was treated, attended the reading of the verdict. Krystyna Kornicka-Ziobro, the wife of the deceased patient, was also present in the courtroom.<\/p>\n
Thursday’s verdict is final. Both the defense counsel for the medics and the prosecution had demanded acquittals, with the prosecution changing its stance during the evidentiary proceedings to ultimately assess that it was impossible to unequivocally state the medics made mistakes.<\/p>\n
The legal representative of the deceased’s widow demanded that the acquitting verdict be annulled and the case referred back to the court of first instance for reconsideration, arguing that the expert witnesses at that stage were not objective and the court lacked impartiality.<\/p>\n
Jerzy Ziobro had been treated since June 2006 at the University Hospital in Krak\u00f3w and died on July 2, 2006, as a result of complications following cardiological procedures. As “Wyborcza” recalls, the family of the deceased accused the doctors of medical malpractice, prompting years of involvement by the justice system.<\/p>\n
The prosecutor’s office twice discontinued the investigation into the matter. In 2011, the family of the deceased filed their own private indictment in court, naming the then-head of the 2nd Department of Cardiology Clinical Hospital prof. Jacek D., then-physician of that ward and deputy head of the Hemodynamics Laboratory prof. UJ Dariusz D., on-duty physician Katarzyna S., and monitored ward head Andrzej K.<\/p>\n
The District Court for Krak\u00f3w-\u015ar\u00f3dmie\u015bcie discontinued the proceedings in 2012, but after appeals to the regional court and subsequently the Supreme Court, the case returned to the first instance. In 2016, the prosecution joined the case on the side of the prosecutors, turning the trial into a public prosecution.<\/p>\n
The district court acquitted the doctors in 2017, ruling there was no link between the doctors’ actions and the patient’s death. Appeals against that verdict were filed by the public prosecutor, attorneys for auxiliary prosecutors, and one of the auxiliary prosecutors.<\/p>\n
The appellate trial began in 2018 at the Krak\u00f3w Regional Court, which in 2022 requested a supplementary opinion from experts at the University Center of Legal Medicine in Lausanne, receiving it about four years later and resuming the trial in June of this year.<\/p>\n
Swiss experts assessed that, according to global guidelines for treating the patient, bypassing\u2014a cardiac surgery\u2014would have been a more favorable choice instead of the coronary angioplasty and stent placement chosen by the Krak\u00f3w doctors.<\/p>\n
At the same time, they indicated that this is merely a recommendation and the choice of treatment rests with the physician. They also noted that bypassing would have carried a high risk of bleeding due to the patient’s therapy, and suggested this risk could have influenced the choice to place stents.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Following a two-decade legal battle, a Polish court has issued a final, binding acquittal for four physicians accused of contributing to the 2006 death of Jerzy Ziobro. Final Court Ruling “Prof. Dariusz Dudek, prof. Jacek Dubiel, prof. Katarzyna Stryczkiewicz, and Dr. Andrzej Kmita are not guilty of the death of Jerzy Ziobro,” ruled the court […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpai_generated_summary":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics-and-law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bizonews.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bizonews.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bizonews.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bizonews.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bizonews.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bizonews.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15639\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bizonews.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bizonews.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bizonews.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}