A three-member panel of the Supreme Court of Cassation (SCC) finally acquitted Dr. Ivan Dimitrov on the charge of murder committed while exceeding the limits of self-defense. The Supreme Magistrates upheld the decision of the Court of Appeal - Plovdiv. The decision is final and not subject to appeal.
The case was initiated on a cassation protest and cassation appeal of the private prosecutors against the appeal decision of the Court of Appeal - Plovdiv. Ivan Dimitrov was initially acquitted by a verdict of the District Court - Plovdiv on the charge of murder committed while exceeding the limits of self-defense. The medic was convicted of possession of firearms and ammunition without a permit. The sentence imposed on him "imprisonment" for 2 years was postponed for 3 years. The Court of Appeal overturned the sentence and sent the case back for a new trial, news.bg recalls.
The magistrates of the Supreme Court accept the cassation protest and the cassation appeal as groundless. The controlled instance conducted an appellate judicial investigation, in the course of which it allowed witnesses to be examined and re-examined others, admitted experts and accepted their conclusions. The appellate court presented detailed arguments regarding the crediting of the oral evidence, contained both in the testimony of the witnesses questioned during the appellate judicial investigation, and those who deposited information before the court of first instance. He clearly stated his opinion on the correspondence between the testimony of the witnesses and the explanations of the defendant. Contrary to the allegations in the protest and appeal, none of the expert opinions were misinterpreted by the appellate court. The arguments of the inspected instance that the explanations of the defendant about the development and mechanism of the incident were confirmed by experts are also well argued, according to the decision of the Supreme Court.
The court of cassation states that all the considered complaints of the cassators in their essence express their dissatisfaction and disagreement with the conclusion of the appeal court that the act was carried out under the conditions of inevitable defense. In essence, the representatives of the state and private prosecution are of the opinion that there was no attack by the victim against the defendant - he did not point a fist at his head, did not throw a knife and did not injure the defendant with it, and he injured himself, was not also threw the metal plate at him.
According to the supreme judges, the assessors do not take into account the fact that the indictment has been charged under Art. 119 of the Criminal Code (murder when exceeding the limits of self-defence) and that the prosecutor who drafted it accepted this legal qualification, assessing the body of evidence established during the pre-trial proceedings. Courts are bound by the factual and legal charges raised by the prosecutor. They can amend it without his intervention only when they establish facts justifying a lesser, equal or equally serious charge. Only the prosecutor in the hypothesis of Art. 287, para. 1 The Criminal Code may bring a more serious charge against the defendant, when the judicial investigation (referring to the first-instance one) establishes grounds for a substantial change in the circumstantial part of the charge or for the application of a law for a more serious punishable crime. "In other words, even if the court of judicial investigation finds that the facts justify the presence of a more severe qualification, it does not have the authority to apply it when issuing its judicial act. In the course of the first-instance judicial investigation, the prosecutor did not change the accusation to a more serious one, which is why the previous instances remained bound by the accusation formulated in the indictment, namely, that the act was carried out under the conditions of inevitable defense", explains the judicial composition of VKS.
According to the cassation instance, fully in accordance with the law and with the judicial practice of its application, the appellate court accepted that Ivan Dimitrov had the legal right to defend himself from the direct, illegal attack by Zhoro Dzevizov, directed against his bodily integrity. He correctly judged that in the circumstances indicated - at night, when he found an unknown person in the act of committing a theft, who had broken into his property, who first tried to punch him, and then, instead of obeying calls to surrender, threw a knife at him, causing an injury to his leg, and then another unidentified object and a heavy metal plate, the perpetrator had the right to use a more intense means of protection, such as the gun he was carrying, causing Jeviz's injury, from which his death subsequently occurred. Taking into account the stated circumstances, the supervised court presented detailed and completely legal arguments in support of its conclusion that the defendant did not exceed the limits of unavoidable defense with his actions. According to the judicial composition of the Supreme Court, the stated cassation grounds are not available, therefore the appeal decision should be left in force.