Czech Republic: Experts testify that police officers caused Romani man's death
Yesterday the trial continued of two police officers from the Czech town of Kynšperk nad Ohří charged with the negligent homicide of a local citizen during a routine patrol in May 2012. This second day of the main hearing was a real delicacy for connoisseurs, as the cream of Prague’s forensic medical experts gave testimony in the courtroom of this small border town.
The hearing began with the deposition of Zdeněk Nachodský, a leading expert in the field of criminalistics whose scholarly books had until recently comprised the primary manuals for police to follow during their interventions. Nachodský told the court that the violent intervention by the police officers need never have taken place.
"Police officers must have enough information when called to a scene" before intervening against a citizen, the expert said. There were neither eyewitnesses nor a victim of any sort of crime at the scene when they arrived.
When the police intervened against Ľudovít Kašpar, he was not even a suspect, as he was not threatening anyone’s health or life. If the officers suspected he was not sane, they should have done their best to calm him down and called their superiors to ask for more information, or called an ambulance and requested a medical intervention to sedate him.
The fact that Mr Kašpar was allegedly talking nonsensically "does not even meet the definition of causing a misdemeanor-level public disturbance," Nachodský said. In the expert’s view, the officers evaluated the situation poorly and then initiated "the production and escalation of violence."
It is therefore not surprising that the man they assaulted began to defend himself. However, unlike the deceased, the officers, by their own admission, were never injured during the intervention.
When the defense attorney noted that Kašpar had not obeyed the officers’ orders, Nachodský replied: "The misdemeanor of failing to obey a police officer is not an adequate reason for the drastic repercussions that followed." The expert testified that "every intervention must be motivated by something" and that in this case there had been no reason to intervene.
"The defendants lost control of their intervention," Nachodský testified. He conceded that they might have been poorly trained.
It was Nachodský’s evaluation in the case of the death of a young Romani man in Tanvald in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day 2012 that became key evidence for the police’s decision to shelve their case against the suspect who shot the youth at close range over a banal argument. This expert, therefore, cannot be suspected of favoritism toward Romani people.
The next person to testify was Robert First, a former lecturer at the Police Academy and an expert on professional police readiness. According to his statement, "the intervention was in order until they asphyxiated him with their collapsible truncheons".
First explained that since 2010 the tactics of police interventions have changed, and according to the new methodology, intervening officers are supposed to first pacify a suspect using pepper spray and then take the suspect in. "Today they are backing away from that again and returning to the original tactics described by Mr Nachodský," First testified.
If the officers had wanted to get this allegedly unmanageable person into their police vehicle, First said they should have called for backup, which they never did. The judge pointed out that the mental state of the victim might not have facilitated comprehension of the officers’ instructions, and asked "What should they have done?"
First then testified that he believed it didn’t matter what they did as long as they intervened somehow. "Let’s say a foreigner doesn’t understand officers calling to him in Czech, should he immediately be pepper-sprayed?" Judge Milan Tomeš asked.
"Certainly, if a Czech travels abroad and doesn’t obey police instructions, they won’t treat him any differently," stated the former instructor. The judge then remarked: "We might as well just have robots as police."
The next person to testify was Jan Šturma, head physician at the Anesthesiology and Resuscitation Clinic at Vinohradská Hospital in Prague. He and two other leading expert witnesses, who were also summoned to the court, had authored the following sentences in their evaluation of more than a year ago, which formed the basis for the reversal in this case:
"The immediate cause of death was a result of the intervention by the members of the Police of the Czech Republic. The critical moment of the intervention was when the victim was placed on his belly with his hands tied behind his back and the intervening officers used their weight against his body, which caused his brain to swell and his subsequent death."
According to expert witness Jiří Hladík, the victim was injured all over his body, not just at soft tissue sites as claimed by the defendants, and there was even a bloody emission on the back of the pharynx as a result of the brute force used against the victim’s neck, which is not exactly evidence of an act of negligence. "The breakage of ribs number one through three could not have occurred during attempts to resuscitate the victim," he testified.
The results of the autopsy unequivocally refute the defense’s claims that a substance in the victim’s body could have caused his death. "Prior to his death the victim had not used either alcohol or narcotic substances," the expert testified.
Professor Jiří Štefan of Prague, who is a physician, gave testimony and then was attacked by defense, who claimed he was basing his testimony on data from the official record compiled by one of the defendants, Pavel Herink, but the professor did not understand the objection. "I didn’t know official police records are supposed to be worthless," he said.
The defense attorney even seemed cute when he cited to the experts a randomly-discovered piece of online journalism claiming that swelling of the brain can just spontaneously occur. I was really sorry there were no television cameras there to capture this second day of the main hearing.
After all, yesterday’s proceedings would have been top-notch inspiration for the world-famous American TV serial "Criminal Minds". The trial will continue on 28 April 2014 at 8:30 AM with testimony from more experts and eyewitnesses at the District Court in Sokolov.
