Czech court overturns bar association's punishment of attorney who laughed at his client's call for non-white children to be gassed
Attorney Michael Mann, who represented Vitězslav Kroupa, convicted of posting hateful commentaries online about a photo of the first-grade class at the Plynárenská Primary School in Teplice, has evaded punishment from his professional association for now. The Czech Bar Association's reprimand to the attorney for having publicly made light of his client's remarks has now been overturned by the Municipal Court in Prague.
The Czech Bar Association must now review the case once more. News server iROZHLAS.cz has reported on the turn of events.
Mann was fined CZK 8,000 [EUR 320] and reprimanded by the Czech Bar Association for saying in an interview with iROZHLAS.cz that his client’s online comment had made him laugh. “They’re from the Plynárenská [Gasworks] Primary School. The solution is right there. Don’t say that didn’t come to your mind too!!!” Kroupa posted to Facebook beneath a photograph of the children in one of the first grade classes at the Teplice school.
The comment is a reference to a gas chamber and targeted the children of Arab, Asian, and Romani descent comprising most of those in the photograph. However, Judge Gabriela Bašná has found that Mann’s statement about his client’s comment was part of his job as his defense counsel and the Bar Association has made a mistake in its proceeding against him.
“It’s tragic when a court has to explain to the attorneys on a disciplinary commission that a brief, truthful answer to a journalist’s question in the performance of a defense cannot be considered a violation of an attorney’s duty,” Mann said to iROZHLAS.cz as he thanked his colleagues and the court for the decision. However, the point made by the verdict was that the commission punished Mann only for the content of his testimony to the disciplinary panel, not for the content of his answer to the journalist’s question which, according to the judge, is not possible.
“The plaintiff [Mann] testified to the disciplinary panel that he had found his client’s statement to have been humorous sarcasm about protected multiculturalism and that he saw no need to depersonalize himself in any way [during the interview with the journalist],” the judgment states. According to the disciplinary commission, Mann thereby admitted that the statement he gave to iROZHLAS.cz was his personal opinion, one that does not deserve protection.
The judge stressed that disciplinary punishment is only possible if a lawyer’s public behavior genuinely harms public trust. According to the court, the commission should not have rendered its decision based solely on Mann’s testimony, but strictly on the basis of his interview quote.
If the disciplinary commission decides to punish Mann a second time, it will have to base its decision exclusively on his publicized words and carefully justify it. Kroupa was ultimately sentenced to 16 months in prison, suspended for three years, in December 2021, when his appeal was rejected by the Czech Constitutional Court.
That court found Kroupa guilty of inciting hatred against a group of people. His defense was made more difficult by the fact that he had publicly spread symbols of Nazism, including a portrait of Adolf Hitler.
According to the courts, Kroupa’s post was not “black humor”, but incitement to hatred and neo-Nazi speech in no uncertain terms.
