Illustrative photo – On November 29, 2022, the Regional Court in Ostrava began hearing the request of Petr Kramný, convicted of double murder, for a retrial.
Ostrava – The Regional Court in Ostrava has finished taking evidence in the hearing of the motion for retrial in the case of Petr Kramný, who was sentenced to 28 years in prison in 2016 for the murder of his wife and daughter while on vacation in Egypt. Prosecutor Vít Legerský requests that the court reject the motion for retrial. It is said that Kramný did not present any new evidence. On the contrary, the convicted's lawyer, Jana Rejžková, is convinced of the opposite. According to her, new reports rule out electric current as the cause of death. Today, the judge adjourned the main trial to Friday, February 10, when the panel will decide.
Advertisement'; }
Photo gallery: Petr Kramný case
ho, the lawyer insists on it” />
Kramný, who denies guilt at the beginning of the trial, referred to the words of his lawyer in his closing speech. “I never hurt my girls, Monica and Klárka,” he just said.
According to the public prosecutor, the current court proceedings do not have the task of evaluating the results of the investigation. “The purpose is to find out whether new evidence has come to light that could change the view of the convict's guilt. Whether the evidence presented is really new. In my opinion, it is not. What the defendant is offering is just a continuation of his defense. The same is being said over and over again. It doesn't bring anything new,” said Legerský.
It does not accept objections regarding the transcripts of wiretaps and telephone calls. For some, Kramný objected that they were rewritten to his disadvantage. “The calls and their transcripts are nothing new. The prosecution had them all along,” he said. According to him, even the three expert opinions drawn up at the request of the defense did not bring anything new. He called the conclusions of some experts purposeful and tendentious. They did not bring anything new, just a different view of the matter, he said. “Therefore, I propose to reject the motion for retrial,” he said.
Rejžková has the opposite opinion. “It is appropriate to resume the criminal proceedings. New expert opinions and their conclusions rule out the previous conclusions that the mother and daughter died after being electrocuted. Petr Kramný is convinced that the originally described course of events cannot stand, and therefore proposes that the court allow the reopening of the proceedings ” said the defense attorney. Kramný submitted the motion for retrial through his lawyer. His mother also joined the proposal.
According to the indictment and the valid sentence, in 2013 Kramny murdered his wife and daughter with electric current in an Egyptian hotel. In this way, he solved long-term disputes in the family. In 2016, he was sentenced to 28 years in prison based on circumstantial evidence.
After being transported to the Czech Republic, the bodies of both women were autopsied by experts from the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Ostrava and concluded that the victims had died from electrocution. According to an expert opinion prepared by the defense, the most likely cause of death was poisoning. The court therefore ordered a review report, which favored electrocution.
The experts who testified in the current proceedings last December do not agree with this. They prepared the reports at the request of the defense and testified in favor of Kramné in court. They questioned the conclusions of previous experts who stated that the mother and daughter died after being electrocuted. Biomechanist Zdeněk Horák stated that, according to him, such a method would be difficult to implement. This was also confirmed by another court expert, Zdeněk Šňupárek.
According to the Šalamoun association, which has been working on the case for a long time, Kramný was convicted on the basis of falsified evidence. “It will be an extremely difficult decision, because according to our sources of information, not a single retrial has been allowed since 1989 in a case where an exceptional sentence was imposed, let alone in the case of an alleged double murder,” said honorary chairman of the association John Bok.
