Slovak Daniel Madarasz, 37, will serve 10.5 years in prison for throwing a German tourist off the walls below Brno’s Spilberk Castle, the appeals High Court in Olomouc ruled on Wednesday, upholding an earlier verdict of the Brno Regional Court.
Consequently, Madarasz, who appealed the Brno court’s verdict again, will serve his sentence for attempted murder.
The German man fell from a height of about six metres and suffered serious injuries, including fractures of two vertebrae and back contusion.
The incident happened during Madarasz’s bachelor party. Madarasz originally claimed that the victim was thrown off the town walls by his cousin.
According to the court, the legal qualification of the act is correct, as the evidence clearly showed that it was the defendant who pushed the victim off the walls. “We have direct evidence in the form of the victim’s testimony and the testimony of other witnesses,” said court panel chairman Roman Raab.
The High Court upheld the sentence and the legal qualification, but at the Wednesday hearing, it also ordered the defendant to pay hundreds of thousands of crowns for non-proprietary damage to the victim, his brother and his parents, who heard the incident live on a phone.
The incident occurred in Brno last September. Madarasz came with a group of friends from Bratislava to Brno to celebrate his upcoming wedding. During the evening, Madarasz and his cousin were drinking alcohol in the park below Spilberk, and came across a 24-year-old German student sitting on the ramparts, talking on the phone to his parents.
According to the verdict, the two men addressed the student in English and shouted that they would kill him. Madarasz then pushed him violently. Witnesses, including the victim, identified a man wearing a white T-shirt as the culprit, which only the defendant was wearing.
Madarasz was proven to have just under one per mille of alcohol in his blood when being arrested, and some of his friends more than that.
He claimed in court that it was his relative who had pushed the German man, and said he himself had stood “transfixed” at the scene. However, CCTV footage captured the defendant appearing entertained by the falling tourist, the judge noted.
