František Kostlán: Contempt for victims' rights has a long tradition, the arsonists' release is part of that

The early release of two of the arsonists who attacked a Romani family with Molotov cocktails is part of this tradition. If a crime victim is Romani, we double down on this tradition.

What do I mean by “crime victims’ rights”? If, for example, a perpetrator gets an absurdly low punishment for murder, then what is the “value” of the murdered person in the eyes of the court (of society)?

For emphasis, I will give you an extreme example: How does society honor the suffering of the victims and their bereaved if the perpetrator doesn’t even serve 100 days for each person he has murdered? (Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist, got just 21 years in prison for murdering 77 people).

Crime victims have a right to the institutions of society taking their lives and their suffering seriously, with empathy – much more seriously than a perpetrator’s rights. A court decision should give satisfaction to the crime victims’ bereaved family and friends (and basically to society as a whole as well) so they can experience saying goodbye to their loved one with a bit less pain, or less experience of their own pain caused by their loved one’s pain.

Logically, if the perpetrators’ rights are fulfilled, that reduces the satisfaction of the victims, and in this case it does so ad absurdum. Two of these four insensitive, Nazi racists – who are also suspected of having committed other arson attacks besides this one – are able to celebrate now.

The convicts are not just celebrating because they are free after serving two-thirds of their sentences, but also because, together with the court, they have now revisited some fear and pain upon their victims. “I feel sick,” Anna Siváková, mother of Natálka, the infant who was severely burned by that attack – and who was also injured in the fire herself – told news server Romea.cz in response to the court decision.

“I’m absolutely in shock. My children are afraid. When they heard [the news], they said they want to move away. Natálka is staying in bed, she’s not saying anything. She doesn’t want to go anywhere, she’s telling me that she has suffered enough.”

Is a society that can allow this to happen a healthy society? I deeply doubt it.

Nothing happened to anybody

The attempted murder of a Romani family by arson, which happened in April 2009 in Vítkov, shook all of society to the core. After many other previous arson attacks and other kinds of assaults were gradually perpetrated by neo-Nazis against Romani people, the justice system, the police, and some politicians woke up from their smug slumber.

The outrage was so great that the attackers got sentences that were adequate to their crime. (The soon-to-be-released Cojocaru and Müller got 20-year sentences, while Lukeš and Vaculík got 22.)

This seems paradoxical – after all, any convicted perpetrator should automatically be given adequate sentencing, right? Yes, that’s the theory.

However, the previous racist crimes, during which Romani people were not completely burned up, or just happened to be killed in some other way, ended either without any punishment or with ridiculously low sentences more than once. The social upheaval of the Vítkov verdict turned out to be temporary, since after Vítkov, similar crimes were mostly given low sentences, which no one was surprised by, because they were “just about Gypsies“, as the Nazis (and not only they) wrote on social media.

The examples of crime victims’ rights being ignored like this would fill quite a voluminous publication. Police did not investigate properly and many cases were shelved, which made it easier for them to claim that “nothing happened to anybody”.

According to the Czech Penal Code, an attempted theft is still a felony, but an attempted Molotov cocktail attack, according to some of the conclusions drawn by police in those days, was not a felony – because, for example, somebody had thrown the bottle into “just” the corridor of a building, not directly into somebody’s apartment as happened years ago in Moravský Beroun (January 2009), and more than once in Opava (where such attacks began at some point in 2008). However, there were also victims in such cases – many Romani tenants moved away from the building in Opava afterwards because they were psychologically scarred, some of their children started wetting their beds, one woman ended up in a psychiatric hospital, etc.

Fear

Kolín district, 2011: A Romani couple had to move out of the apartment unit they owned – even though, according to some members of the public “nothing happened” to them. In Býchory near Kolín, a gang on their way home from a pub threw a burning torch through their window. A visitor in the room put out the fire. The couple were so frightened that they moved away from the village to a new place and one year afterward were still afraid to testify in court in the presence of the perpetrators. (The main perpetrator eventually got four years without parole, an adequate sentence.)

Nový Bydžov, 2012: After a demonstration by the “Workers’ Social Justice Party” (DSSS), two Romani people had their faces beaten and kicked in a town full of police officers who were supposed to be preventing violence. One victim suffered head injuries and fell unconscious, fortunately without any further repercussions. Police officers found brass knuckles, and iron bar, and a log at the crime scene. None of these items was fingerprinted or DNA tested, despite requesting samples from the suspects to do so. The assailants were eventually acquitted because of the detectives’ poor work: as with a previous case, the judge added to the justification of the district court’s judgment that the police illegally carried out the defendants’ identification (the perpetrators were recognized just on sight). Police, according to the judge, should have had eyewitnesses or the injured parties identify the perpetrators through a lineup. The police never organized a lineup despite having all of the suspects available.

Nýrsko 2011: One of the most repugnant racist cases happened in the town of Nýrsko. “The children ran in from outside saying skinheads were chasing them. A moment later the doorbell rang. My niece opened the window and a 100-kg hulk with a shaved head swung a baseball bat at her from the street. She quickly closed the window and then we heard banging on the door,” said Miroslav Červeňák (age 29) at the time. He got up the courage to open the door to see what was happening. “I was punched once I opened the door. Then they grabbed me and dragged me about 50 meters. I called for help. All I can remember is lying on the ground unable to breathe. They wrapped a sweatshirt around my throat and pulled on it more and more. I absolutely lost consciousness,“ he recalled. His family saved him by running out and facing down the neo-Nazis. The assailants eventually ran off and then drove out of town. On the way they had an accident – they skidded on a bend, hit a wall, and then ran away from the scene of the accident. They were apprehended by police soon afterward. The driver failed a breathalyzer test and the officers ascertained that according to a previous verdict his driver’s license had been revoked. The other perpetrator had been sentenced for disorderly conduct before. Both thugs were given suspended sentences by the first instance court (for what I believe was obviously attempted murder) of 18 months, suspended for three years. The court also rejected the victims’ request for compensation as part of the criminal proceeding and instructed them to sue in civil court for that. The prosecutor did not appeal.

We’ve written about this a thousand times, but let’s just also briefly recall the 1990s, when perpetrators first got suspended sentences for manslaughter or murder (the court of course prosecuted them on lesser charges). Harsher sentences only started being handed down years later.

Model behavior

This kind of contempt for crime victims naturally is not just about Romani people and not only about Czech society. I’ve already mentioned Breivik and Norway’s approach to those victims, and a similar approach exists throughout all of European culture, which in this regard has taken a step in the wrong direction and mostly privileges perpetrators’ rights over crime victims’ rights.

In the Czech Republic there is no opportunity to “cap” a prison sentence at 21 years, as exists in Norway, but the court when evaluating the conditional release of prisoners does not act on the matter of the original charges, it just assesses the convicts’ behavior while serving their sentences and whether “they have reformed” – it takes no view of the crime they committed and therefore takes no view of the victims.

It’s as if the crime victims didn’t even exist. That’s wrong.

The court decides based on things that are quite uncertain, such as psychological evaluations (and we know that very often such evaluations contradict themselves). Cojocaru and Müller were praised a lot for their good behavior, according to the justification for the verdict and the arguments for their release.

Burn victim Natálie Kudriková can behave in an exemplary fashion for the rest of her life, but it won’t do her any good at all. The result is sad: The court’s verdict feels to us like contempt for the crime victims’ rights and contempt for justice per se.