STRONG AND RELIABLE REPRESENTATION IN LEGAL PROCEEDINGS

Damage to property, threats, insult, injury

The Court of Cassation examined decisions concerning a dispute that arose between the parties due to an inheritance lawsuit. It found no legal violation in the convictions and acquittals rendered in respect of some of the offences of insult, threats, simple injury and damage to property; the appeals were dismissed and those judgments were upheld. However, the acquittal of one defendant for the offence of insult was quashed. The reason was that the witness stated during the investigation stage that the defendant had insulted the complainant by saying, “Enough already, you scoundrel…”; however, the witness gave a different account at the hearing. The court of first instance rendered an acquittal without resolving the contradiction between these two statements or explaining why it had preferred one statement over the other. Consequently, the Court of Cassation upheld most of the judgments but quashed, for insufficient reasoning, the acquittal concerning the offence of insult, which had been rendered without adequately assessing the contradiction between the witness statements.