In the case, it was evaluated whether the court of appeal justifiedly left unchanged the acquittal of the first instance court. After checking what was stated in the prosecutor’s cassation protest and the victim’s representative’s cassation complaint, the AT appellate instance court decision was canceled and the case was sent for a new consideration, LETA agency was informed by AT.
According to the indictment, on December 29, 2018, the driver hit four pedestrians at the “Dzintari Concert Hall” bus stop in Jūrmala.
The court of first instance acquitted the defendant and the court of appeals left this verdict unchanged, because the driver did not foresee and should not have foreseen that pedestrians would cross the road in an unauthorized place, grossly violating the traffic rules. In addition, the court found that the place was poorly lit and the pedestrians were without light-reflecting elements.
AT admitted that the evidence in the case was not evaluated in accordance with the requirements of the Criminal Procedure Law. Moreover, some court opinions are contradictory. From the judgment of the court of first instance, which has been joined by the court of appeal, no clear conclusion can be drawn about the moment when the accused saw the victims.
AT, based on the provisions of the Law on Criminal Procedure, stated that the court of appeal did not evaluate all the facts or information about the facts obtained during the criminal proceedings as a whole and in relation to each other. Evaluating the news as a whole means that, although reliability is an inherent feature of each individual piece of evidence, it can only be determined by looking at the relevant piece of evidence in a unified system with other pieces of evidence and assessing how their interrelationships are formed.
Baron is charged under the article of the Criminal Law for violating traffic rules.
The tragic traffic accident happened in the evening of December 2018. Four people, in the dark of the day, without reflective elements on their clothing, on Meža prospect in Jūrmala, crossed a busy road in a place not intended for it, even though there was an adjustable pedestrian crossing nearby.
The prosecutor’s office previously wrote in a press release that according to the indictment, the accused was driving his own car and, disregarding traffic rules, hit four pedestrians at the “Dzintari concert hall” bus stop.
Two male victims died, while two other victims were seriously and moderately injured, respectively.
The deceased were Stakis’s father and grandfather.
