Polish president pardons mother of four who stabbed husband’s attacker

President Andrzej Duda has pardoned a woman who was sentenced to three years in prison for stabbing a man who was fighting with her then husband.

The woman, a 27-year-old from the city of Wrocław who has been named only as Angelika, has four young children, two of whom are autistic. She had appealed to the president for a pardon on the basis that her children would be placed into state care if she served her jail term.

“I know I have hurt a person and I am not evading punishment. I am guilty,” she wrote in a letter to the president, quoted by news website Onet. “[But if] I have to go to prison, what will happen to my children then? I am begging you – parent to parent – for a pardon.”

The event that led to Angelika’s conviction occurred in January 2020. Her family had been in conflict with a neighbour for several years and one night her husband was confronted by a friend of that neighbour, leading to a physical altercation.

Angelika took a knife and stabbed the other man, arguing later that she felt she had been defending her husband, herself and her four-year-old child.

“Every day, I grapple with why I took that knife. I wonder how I could have run the scenario differently so that it wouldn’t be as terrible as it is now,” she told Onet in February. “I acted instinctively, especially when my son came out onto the stairwell…I was afraid of what this man might do to my child.”

But the courts disagreed. They found that, while Angelika had not intended to kill the man – who survived the incident – she was guilty of causing serious bodily harm to the victim. She was sentenced to three years in prison, the lowest possible punishment.

During the legal process, she spent seven months in pretrial detention. However, after receiving her guilty verdict, the courts agreed to postpone her sentence due to due to the fact that Angelika – now divorced from her husband – was her children’s sole caregiver.

She now has four children ranging in age from seven years to eight months. Two of them are autistic and require regular medical visits. “My life revolves around them,” Anglelika told the Gazeta Wyborcza daily.

She had been due to begin serving her prison sentence on 25 May, and claimed that when that happened the children would have to be put into state care.

As such, Angelika sought an act of clemency from the president. The two courts that had previously issued and upheld her guilty verdict both positively assessed her application for a pardon.

On Thursday this week, Angelika was told in court that the president had agreed to provisionally pardon her for a period of five years, during which time should be supervised by a probation officer.

“Thank you for the second chance,” she said, speaking to Onet. “I want to correct my mistakes and not make them again.”

The president’s office has not commented on the pardon or the reasons for it.

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Main image credit: Tomasz Pietrzyk / Agencja Wyborcza.pl

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.