The Supreme Court decided finally – 23-year-old Viktor Vassilev, who killed his own father Ivan Hristov in 2018 in the village of Dobrevtsi, commune. Yablanitsa, will be in prison for 15 years. Ivan Hristov, who was shot with a hunting rifle, was a businessman known as the King of Halves and Turkish Delights.
The day after the murder, Viktor was captured, and he confessed to the investigators about the crime. Acquaintances claim that the reason that pushed Victor to the crime was his father’s extramarital affair with a blonde beauty. Because of her, he withdrew from his family and even moved out of his home to live together in a house next to his house.
With Decision No. 50181/24.01.2023 in criminal case No. 528/2022, a three-member panel of the Supreme Court of Cassation (SCC) upheld the decision under v.n.o.h.d. No. 373/2020 of the Court of Appeal – Veliko Tarnovo. The decision is not subject to appeal, the Supreme Court announced.
The case was initiated on the cassation appeal of Viktor Vasilev against the appellate decision, which confirmed the sentence under the criminal law. No. 352/2019 of the District Court – Lovech. With it, the defendant was found guilty of the fact that on 25.02.2018 in a house in the village of Dobrevtsi, commune. Yablanitsa, intentionally killed his father Ivan Hristov (known as the Halva King) by firing a shot with a hunting rifle. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
The Supreme Court received a notification from a prosecutor about actions taken to fulfill the imposed punishment.
The judicial panel of the Supreme Court considers the accusations of a substantial violation of the procedural rules made in the appeal to be groundless. The evidentiary evaluation of the defendant’s confession made by the Court of Appeal – Veliko Tarnovo is in full compliance with the requirements of the provision of Art. 116 of the Criminal Code, containing a prohibition that the conviction was passed in isolation on evidence gathered from the defendant’s explanations, which incriminate him for committing the crime. The position of the appellate instance, according to which the information deposited by Vassilev during his pre-trial interrogation should be valued as a reliable source of evidence, is convincingly defended in the reasons, as it is built on the basis of a complex analysis of the available evidence , reported in support of the defendant’s explanations that he was the author of the act, as well as that the gunshot wound that caused the death was produced precisely with the weapon that he surrendered with a protocol of voluntary surrender.
The factual conclusions in the part of the reasons, related to the mechanism of the act and the means by which it was carried out, were formed procedurally correctly, the supreme judges point out. The evidence collected was evaluated in accordance with the rules of formal logic, with the result that the reviewing court reached a defensible conclusion that the defendant caused the death of his father by firing two shots with his personally owned firearm, one of which he was fatal.
The controlled instance is unjustifiably accused of ignoring the conclusion of the repeated fifth complex psychiatric and psychological examination. According to the supreme judges, both the expertise on which the assessor emphasizes, as well as the other assigned expertise, having the task of examining the behavior of the defendant on the level of whether there is evidence of physiological affect, were thoroughly discussed and analyzed by the reviewed court, which was approached their assessment extremely precisely and carefully.
The complaint of a violation of the law in the cassation appeal was raised in the first place as a consequence of the admitted violations of the procedural rules regulating the evidentiary and analytical activity of the appellate court and of its obligation to take all measures to clarify the objective truth. The specified vices are not present, the three-member composition of the Supreme Court found. The factual circumstances accepted by the two instances on the facts were brought under the norm of Art. 116, item 3, item 1 in conjunction with 115 of the Criminal Code. All elements of the objective and subjective side of this act were established through the relevant evidentiary methods and were correctly qualified as a crime under this criminal composition of the Criminal Code.
According to the supreme judges, the appellate court correctly accepted the absence of a state of physiological affect in the defendant, as it did not establish the presence of the legal prerequisite for the possibility of applying this legal qualification. The conclusion that it is not the victim’s behavior but that of the defendant that is illegal is justified and consistent with the evidence. It was Vassilev who, in the early afternoon of the incriminated date, visited the home inhabited by his father three times in short order. After the first two visits, irritated by the conversation between the two, the defendant left his father’s house, visited the one where he lived and from whom he took his legally owned hunting weapon, and then returned to his father’s house again, as on entering fired two shots there, one of which was fatal. “Precisely this sequence of conscious, orderly and purposeful actions of the defendant Vasilev were correctly discussed by the appeals court, which reached a correct conclusion regarding the correct application of the substantive law by the first instance court, which classified the act as a crime under Art. 116, item 3, item 1, item 1, art. 115 of the Criminal Code”, the supreme judges are categorical.
According to the judicial composition of the Supreme Court, the complaint about the manifest injustice of the imposed punishment is also groundless. The appellate court was extremely careful when it confirmed the activity of the district court on the individualization of the punishment imposed on the defendant, which was determined with a preponderance of mitigating circumstances in the minimum prescribed amount. There is no discrepancy between the degree of public danger of the act and the perpetrator, on the one hand, and the measured volume of state coercion, on the other, which is why there is no need to amend the appealed decision in its sanctioning part, the supreme judges wrote. This was announced by the press center of the Supreme Court of Cassation.
