Patrik Banga on the release of the suspect preliminarily charged with murdering a Romani man in Brno, Czech Republic: Romani people are not raging, as some media are reporting! The Roma are disappointed.

The conclusion of the prosecutor was that he agreed this person should be prosecuted for murder. The guy is at large now, though, and the court is satisfied with his written guarantee that he will not flee and that he will cooperate.

Ok. I will maintain the presumption of his innocence.

That person has yet to be convicted, therefore he is innocent. He will be innocent until such time as the court says otherwise.

When the court decided to release him from custody, it sent the clear signal that it does not see this case as one of murder. The suspect’s version of events, according to the media reporting, is apparently that he was acting in self-defense.

So: A guy carrying a knife is riding the tram in Brno, and some Romani passengers are making noise and smoking on the tram. Other passengers are afraid of them, so the guy with the knife (who will end up being charged with murder, preliminarily) shouts at the Romani passengers.

There is a scuffle, when they are off of the tram they slap each other, and after the guy ends up lying on the ground, he pulls his knife. The Roma kick him when he’s on the ground, but he manages to stab two of them, one fatally.

The police intervene, and the prosecutor preliminarily charges this person with murder. Is there anything odd about this picture?

Yes, there is. A person is said to be lying on the ground and being kicked by others, but he manages to injure one assailant and kill another?

What did the prosecutor base his opinion on when he agreed the crime could preliminarily be qualified as murder? Didn’t the police interrogate witnesses?

Why wasn’t the suspect preliminarily charged with manslaughter, or bodily injury resulting in death, or disproportionate self-defence? Anybody charged with a crime has the right to defend himself, or course.

Any attorney will also certainly choose the defense method that has the biggest chance of succeeding. That’s nothing we haven’t seen here before.

In 2013, I personally reported on the case of a non-Romani homeowner firing a crossbow at a Romani man who happened to be standing on his property in Chotěbuz. The Romani man died as a result, and the homeowner claimed to have been acting in self-defense.

He forgot to include the information in his claim that after firing his weapon, he walked over to the victim to measure the arrow he had shot through the head of one of the Romani people there. He also forgot to say the Romani people had never assaulted him and that they were never in his home.

The public was clear on what had happened, based on the suspect’s distortions. They believed he had been alone and had been outnumbered by Romani people who were assaulting him, and therefore they took up a collection to pay his attorney.

Nobody believed anything the Romani eyewitnesses had to say, nobody listened to them. News server iDNES.cz was the media outlet to first report their version of what happened in Chotěbuz.

Jaromír Šebesta eventually got 10 years for his crime. There was a similar case in Chomutov.

A non-Romani person who was bothered by noise in front of his apartment building and by a Romani man whom he alleged was driving his van into parked cars, literally shot him dead behind the wheel. In his case, too, we heard the claim “I didn’t mean to murder him, I was just defending myself,” – literally.

In that case as well, the defense built its case on self-defense, and for a moment it seemed he would get off scot-free. From the first-instance court he got a 12.5 year sentence, and eventually the appellate court reduced it to seven years.

Just as in this Brno case, that murderer was released from custody ahead of the trial itself. We Roma have experience with this sort of thing.

I have decidedly not described all the experiences we have had with these scenarios, because that would not be a commentary, but a book. The difference is just that in the current case, more than one judge from more than one venue has not identified with the prosecutor’s qualification of the crime.

Here it is appropriate to say that it is the duty of the judge to review how the crime happened and under what circumstances. The problem, though, lies somewhere else.

Has anybody informed the family of the deceased, or of the other injured Romani man, that the person preliminarily charged with murder is now at large? Probably not, the media would have been full of that particular news.

Did anybody from the court’s press department realize how many people are actually following this case? Why are politicians meeting with Romani representatives and promising much better communications on sensitive matters when they are unable to deliver?

Why, after the court decided to release the man from custody, was Czech Government Commissioner for Roma Minority Affairs Lucie Fuková not informed of the fact? That would have given her room to explain to the Romani community that being released from custody decidedly does not mean the person is no longer charged.

Why, as part of maintaining the peace, weren’t the media outlets serving the Romani community involved in delivering that message? Isn’t this kind of “communication” exactly what promotes prejudice and strengthens extremists?

How in the hell do you expect to be able to explain to people who are not oriented in the law that the judge in this case has been genuinely proceeding according to the law? How do you plan to prevent extremists from inciting people against each other without that explanation?

Finally, who will be responsible for the spread of disinformation such as “Ukrainians get away with anything, even murder?” The aim of such communications is meant to be calming emotions and taking steps that are proactive.

Silence is of no aid to anybody. Silence does damage.

It is exactly this communications failure that I consider to be “spitting in the face” of the family of the dead Romani man and of the entire Romani community. Romani people today are reading, in the majority media, hundreds of discussion posts about how this case has been clear to them all from the beginning and how “finally somebody showed those gypsies how to handle ‘gypsy fair play’ “.

This incident is not how to handle anybody’s distortion of “fair play”, though. To injure one person and kill another is decidedly not what I imagine to be the way one resolves conflicts.

Personally speaking, I also don’t carry a knife when I go outdoors. Even though I have also been assaulted in my life – most recently, by the way, by three Ukrainian guys in front of my house – I didn’t pull out a pistol and I didn’t shoot anybody.

After all, I don’t live in the wild. I was born in the Czech Republic.

Up until now, I wasn’t especially hanging on the developments of this case, but I will actually be carefully following from now on how the court handles the defense’s arguments. After all of the above-described experience, my feeling is that people will always believe what they want to believe.

My hope is the courts will stick to the facts. Whatever they show.