In Ukraine, a court has ordered the state to pay 5 million hryvnias to a man who spent years behind bars on a murder charge without sufficient evidence, in a case that dragged on for more than 11 years and was only concluded after the Supreme Court intervened.
The crime occurred in August 2013 in a village in the Kolomyia district of the Ivano-Frankivsk region. At that time, an unknown person entered the house of an elderly woman, demanded money, and after she refused, killed her with numerous stab wounds. Cash and a mobile phone disappeared from the apartment.
The suspect in the case is a 28-year-old man who had previously been prosecuted for theft. He initially denied involvement in the crime and claimed that he was at home at the time of the murder. This version, he said, was confirmed by data from the laptop.
At the same time, the investigation found no direct evidence of his presence at the crime scene. There were no witnesses, no traces of blood, and no murder weapon. The only evidence was a fingerprint on the battery of the deceased's mobile phone, found a few kilometers from the crime scene.
The accused himself insisted that this evidence could have been falsified. Despite this, the courts found him guilty several times and sentenced him to 13 years in prison. In fact, he served half of this term, since at that time the rule was to credit one day of pre-trial detention for two days of sentence.
The man was released in 2020, but the case continued. Only in January 2025 did the Supreme Court overturn all previous convictions and close the case, recognizing that guilt had not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt and that the possibilities for collecting new evidence had been exhausted.
After that, the man went to court to demand compensation for moral damages, which he estimated at 15 million hryvnias. The court of first instance awarded 2 million, but the appeals court increased the amount of compensation to 5 million hryvnias.
The decision notes that the long-term criminal prosecution and imprisonment at a young age significantly affected the man's life. He lost the opportunity to fulfill himself, suffered from deteriorating health, and also faced financial problems and social isolation. The consequences of the wrongful conviction, according to the court's findings, are felt even after his release.
This case once again raises the question of the quality of investigations and the responsibility of the law enforcement system for mistakes that can cost people years of their lives.
Recall that we previously wrote about a horrific crime in the Kyiv region, where the murder of a child caused a wide resonance - then law enforcement officers reported the first details of the tragedy and the circumstances under which it happened.
