Czech court gives suspended sentence to father who filmed himself instructing child to beat pillow and "Imagine it's a Gypsy"
A Czech court has handed down its sentence against a man from the Benešov area who filmed himself urging his daughter to slam a baseball bat into a pillow while imagining she was beating a Muslim or Romani person. He uploaded footage of his parenting to social networking sites and charges were filed against him.
While the man could have been sentenced to as long as three years in prison, news server Lidovky.cz reports that he has been given a suspended sentence. The 27-year- old father uploaded the footage to social networking sites, where several hundreds of thousands of viewers watched it.
Media reported on the case and police began to investigate at the beginning of August. The girl’s father was prosecuted for inciting hatred and for endangering the moral development of a child.
The District Court in Benešov handed down its verdict without trial. “The sentence of deprivation of liberty for one year, suspended for a period of three years under probationary supervision, has been handed down by court order,” Pavel Vosmanský, vice-chair of the District Court in Benešov, confirmed to Lidovky.cz.
The verdict is already in effect. The court first received the indictment in October.
The case was not dealt with by convening a trial – the court handled it by issuing a verdict and ordering sentencing. In other words, the court found that it did not need to hear from the defendant or any eyewitnesses in order to make its decision, arriving at its conclusions on the basis of the information provided by the police file and the state prosecutor.
“The punishment was what we proposed,” prosecutor Irena Šemberová told Lidovky.cz. The man must maintain a clean criminal record for the next three years or be sent behind bars for one year.
Officials with the Probation and Mediation Services will monitor his lifestyle during his probation. “Generally, what that means for the convict is the obligation to visit the Probation and Mediation Services center at the interval established by a specific probation officer, to facilitate the probation officer’s entrance to the convict’s residence, and the obligation to cooperate with the probation officer, which means informing the officer about his lifestyle, employment and income,” Jitka Pohunková, head of Probation and Mediation Services in Benešov, told Lidovky.cz.
