The Debrecen General Court sentenced the 31-year-old accused in custody to the detriment of a 12-year-old relative who was under the age of 12, using his state of inability to defend herself, to 8 years in prison and 8 years in public affairs. It shall be definitively prohibited from engaging in any occupation or other activity in which a person under the age of eighteen years is educated, supervised, cared for, or treated, or has any other power or influence in relation to such person.
According to the prevailing court facts, the defendant has been in a cohabiting relationship since 2018 with a woman whose two minor daughters from a previous marriage were raised jointly in a village in Bihar County. In the early fall of 2020, in the absence of the rest of the family in the apartment building, the defendant captured the cloth-covered lower body of her 5-year-old foster child and then, pointing to her genitals, called her to have sex with him. The little girl then ran out into the yard and cried and told her mother what the accused had done to her. The woman immediately questioned her, but her partner denied what had happened.
In accordance with the established custom of the family, the accused slept on a separate couch with the victim. A few days later, she was again sexually assaulted. Meanwhile, the mother got up and left for the toilet. However, under the light of a street lamp illuminating a window without a curtain, she saw what the accused was doing to her child. Now that she had personally spotted this, she made a report at dawn in het firm belief that her little girl had told the truth before. Fearing the influence of her partner’s family, the authorities soon provided accommodation in the Secret Shelter in the Temporary Home for Families, and later the guardianship authority decided to place the children in foster care. With her sexual act, the accused moderately endangered the emotional development of the victim with low intellectual abilities.
The prosecution appealed against the accused to aggravate his sentence. The accused and his counsel sought acquittal for lack of crime or evidence.
The crime of sexual violence charged against the accused is punishable by law from five to twenty years in prison.
According to the Debrecen General Prosecutor’s Office, the sentence of imprisonment well below the average is unreasonably light. It is not sufficiently adapted to the real material gravity of the crime or the degree of guilt. It therefore does not comply with the purposes and principles of sentencing set out in the law. The General Prosecutor’s Office therefore considers that, given the alarming frequency of similar offenses committed against minors, the public prosecutor’s appeal for stricter liability is well founded. The accused, by abusing the vulnerable, addicted position of the victim, who was only 5 years old, continued to commit his racial act, endangering both the minor’s moral and spiritual development.
On the basis of the prosecution and defense appeals, the Debrecen Judgment Board decides in the second instance.
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