The Bratislava I District Court on April 9 confirmed its May 2013 conviction of nurse Jaroslav Dobiaš on charges of murdering a hospital patient in June 2011. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
The young man, nicknamed by the media the “Angel of Death”, was convicted of administering a lethal combination of drugs to a 63-year-old female patient at Kramáre University Hospital in Bratislava.
Testimonies by witnesses and court-appointed experts proved that the man, aged 29 in June 2011, willfully committed the act, albeit with the alleged intention of easing the patient’s pain. Dobiaš himself initially confessed to the act, but his attorney said that the defendant had made the confession under police coercion and with no attorney present. The defendant later said that he wanted to administer a pain-reliever to the patient but ended up giving her a lethal combination of medications by mistake.
He was well aware that the injection containing the drugs Ebrantil and Esmeron would result in heart failure, the verdict concluded. “The [court] panel is of the opinion that after many years of practice, the defendant couldn’t have mistaken the medication,” said the chairman of the panel, as quoted by the TASR newswire.
When Dobiaš – who was in court on that day – was sentenced to 20 years in prison for murder last year, he appealed against the ruling and the case ended up at Bratislava Regional Court which found errors in the trial proceedings and repealed the ruling of the District Court – which then had to decide upon the case again. The defence lawyer has again appealed and the case is now heading back to Bratislava Regional Court.
Investigators checked into other death cases in Trenčín hospital where Dobiaš had worked previously, but no suspicions were confirmed.
(Source: TASR, SITA)
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
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