During a closed hearing in Katowice, Robert Janczewski, acquitted in the infamous “Skin Case” after seven years in detention, seeks over 22.5 million zlotys in compensation for wrongful imprisonment. <\/p>\n
On Monday, the Katowice court held the second hearing regarding the application filed by Robert Janczewski, who agreed to the publication of his name. The man moves with difficulty, using crutches. His attorneys filed a motion to exclude the public for the duration of the testimony.<\/p>\n
As one of the lawyers, advocate \u0141ukasz Chojniak, argued, talking in front of cameras about numerous medical conditions and what happened to him in detention would be extremely traumatic for Janczewski. Judge Roman Kubi\u015b ultimately agreed to close the entire hearing, forcing journalists to leave the courtroom.<\/p>\n
During the first hearing in February, the applicant’s mother testified that her son wrote from detention stating he was devastated, plunged in despair, and terrified. He claimed he was humiliated, hounded, isolated, and subjected to humiliating examinations against his will.<\/p>\n
Robert Janczewski’s mother also testified that her son had received psychiatric treatment even before his arrest and was in a tragic state upon release. She stated he returned home bitten by bedbugs, suffering from bone system diseases, a damaged hip joint, missing teeth, and vision problems.<\/p>\n
Advocate \u0141ukasz Chojniak pointed out that this case lasted for Robert Janczewski not seven years, but much longer, dating back to 2000 when he was first detained. The lawyer recalled that his client never admitted guilt and argued that Janczewski was long treated as a dangerous prisoner without the right to contact family or defend against charges, ruining his health irreversibly.<\/p>\n
Robert Janczewski and his lawyers are demanding over 22.5 million zlotys in compensation for wrongful arrest in their submitted motion. The case was transferred to Katowice because the Acquittal was issued by the Court of Appeal in Krak\u00f3w, and the opposing party is the State Treasury represented by that court’s president.<\/p>\n
The “Skin Case” is considered one of the biggest mysteries in Polish forensics, concerning the murder of 23-year-old student Katarzyna Z., whose skin fragments and other body parts were fished out of the Vistula River in the late 1990s. The investigation was conducted by the Ma\u0142opolska Regional Division of the Department for Organized Crime and Corruption of the National Prosecutor’s Office in Krak\u00f3w.<\/p>\n
In 2017, Robert Janczewski was arrested. In 2022, the Regional Court in Krak\u00f3w ruled in a non-final verdict that the man killed the young woman, desecrated her body, and threw her remains into the river, sentencing him to life imprisonment. The Court of Appeal in Krak\u00f3w acquitted the man in October 2024, stipulating it had no conviction regarding either the guilt or innocence of Janczewski, applying the criminal trial principle that unresolvable doubts must be resolved in favor of the accused, allowing him to leave custody.<\/p>\n
As previously reported by Gazeta.pl, at the end of June this year, the Supreme Court dismissed the prosecutor’s cassation against Janczewski’s acquittal, thereby concluding the multi-year trial regarding this crime.<\/p>\n
Supreme Court Judge Barbara Skoczkowska stated that the case is fundamentally a failure of law enforcement agencies rather than the justice system, noting that the judiciary led to the acquittal of the accused. She emphasized that the case had an exceptionally circumstantial character and law enforcement failed to find even a single direct piece of evidence proving Janczewski’s guilt, adding that for someone’s guilt, the chain of circumstantial evidence must be unbreakable and form a logical whole, which was not the case here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
During a closed hearing in Katowice, Robert Janczewski, acquitted in the infamous “Skin Case” after seven years in detention, seeks over 22.5 million zlotys in compensation for wrongful imprisonment. The Second Hearing and Closed Proceedings On Monday, the Katowice court held the second hearing regarding the application filed by Robert Janczewski, who agreed to the […]<\/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-18287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics-and-law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bizonews.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18287","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=18287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bizonews.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18287\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bizonews.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bizonews.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bizonews.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}