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In her appeal, Rita Mikalauskienė, Prosecutor of the Kaunas District Prosecutor’s Office of the Kaunas Regional Prosecutor’s Office, requested that the Jonava Palace of the Kaunas District Court absolution set aside the case and refer the case to the Court of First Instance if it is concluded that the case has been heard by a partial court.
If this request was not granted, the prosecutor requested that the sentence of September 26, 2019 be annulled and that a new sentence be passed declaring D. Staliauskas guilty of a crime under Article 188 § 2 of the Penal Code and imposing a 400 MSL fine (20,000 EUR). . The company Pirotechnikos Produkti was also asked to plead guilty and to impose a fine of 2000 MGL (100 thousand euros).
The prosecutor based the impartiality of the court on the fact that he excluded the prosecutor from the trial.
The prosecutor also did not agree with the district court’s conclusion in the complaint that the burned buildings were not included in the Cultural Heritage Register and therefore were not of significant scientific, historical or cultural significance. According to her, they were in the museum exhibition and these are buildings both historically and ethnically significant for the history of Lithuania, valued at € 75,256.31.
The prosecutor ruled out the possibility that the fire could have originated from the torch. According to the prosecutor, the launch site of the pyrotechnic devices did not meet the requirements for their installation: the stability of the platform base was not guaranteed, nor was the safety distance of at least 15 meters observed for the F3 fireworks of the pyrotechnic article to any other object. Furthermore, the pyrotechnic articles used were not properly labeled and their use was not coordinated at all with the municipal administration.
The defendants asked the prosecutor to dismiss the appeal. In response to the prosecutor’s complaint, the defendants’ advocates provided calculation-based schemes that they said confirmed that if some fireworks were fired and not vertically, the distance of 484 meters (from the permission of the pyrotechnic article even the burned buildings) would still not be reached. In addition, fireworks were launched from the same location in previous years, i.e. 2016. during the festival. Therefore, the Fire and Rescue Service found no minimum circumstance for breach of the safety distance in 2016 or 2017.
On July 8, the Kaunas Regional Court, as an appeal body, decided to dismiss the prosecutor’s appeal. The panel of judges stated that although certain conclusions made in the Jonava Chamber trial (due to the high value of the burned buildings, the burned buildings were valuable) are not correct, they do not invalidate the final decision (has not been proved that the accused has no sign of crime).
Specialists with special knowledge were interviewed at the appeals court hearing to learn about the cultural and historical importance of the destroyed buildings. Taking into account their explanations, the panel of judges concluded that the exhibition consisting of a wooden residential house and a wooden annex building, which caught fire during the museum fire on August 6, 2017, has great historical value and cultural. The museum is a state republican museum, so everything on display there is also valued nationally. The essential criterion by which the buildings in the museum cannot be registered in the Register of Cultural Heritage is that these buildings are not in their original environment, that is, they are moved to the territory of the museum from various parts of Lithuania.
The Kaunas Regional Court did not see the bias of the lower court.
The panel of judges concluded that no serious violations of the legislation governing the use of civil pyrotechnic articles (fireworks) have been identified. D.Staliauskas, acting as the company’s representative, complied with all safety requirements as well as recommendations for pyrotechnicians, and “Pyrotechnic Products” ensured that appropriate fireworks were used and their launch was coordinated with relevant authorities during the event. The investigation revealed that the pyrotechnic items used during the festival were purchased in Poland, so the considerations set out in the prosecutor’s appeal about the use of cartridges more powerful than those allowed are only hypothetical and unsupported.
After evaluating all the data in the case, the fact that the farm caught fire during the incident did not light up (which may have attracted young people who wanted privacy), there were no fire safety measures, a camp was set up nearby from the farm and intoxicated people behaved completely properly and possibly did not completely control their actions, lighted signal torches were used during the event, completely rejected the version that the farm’s thatched roof could catch fire from a foreign object (probably a signal torch), according to research, according to Kaunas Regional Court, not possible.
In this case, according to the panel of judges of the Kaunas Regional Court, the consequences arose without fault of the acquitted, therefore, the appealed ruling of the court of first instance is legal and justified.
The decision of the Kaunas Regional Court takes effect on the day of its adoption.
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