UK woman loses jail term appeal after killing man as he sexually assaulted her

A pistillate who stabbed a antheral to decease arsenic helium sexually assaulted her has mislaid an entreaty against her 17-year jailhouse term.

Martyna Ogonowska was handed a beingness condemnation aged 18 aft being convicted of the 2018 execution of Filip Jaskiewicz, 23, successful a Peterborough car park, utilizing a weapon she said she carried for aforesaid protection.

Sentencing her astatine Cambridge crown tribunal successful 2019, Judge Farrell QC told Ogonowska that Jaskiewicz “undoubtedly touched you sexually and was convulsive to you soon earlier helium was killed”. But helium said it did not suffice arsenic self-defence due to the fact that Ogonowska, who helium accepted suffered from immoderate intelligence disablement and had experienced erstwhile trauma, had taken a weapon to the scene.

On Friday, the tribunal of entreaty rejected Ogonowska’s entreaty against her sentence. An entreaty against her condemnation was rejected successful 2023. Her lawyers had argued that the minimum jailhouse presumption should person been 12 to 13 years alternatively than 17 years.

In the tribunal of appeal’s judgment, Lord Justice Stuart-Smith wrote: “However we attack it, this was inactive a dense condemnation for a young idiosyncratic with the applicant’s attributes to bear; but connected the judge’s findings this was a superior transgression adjacent aft each allowances and mitigation is taken into account. We are yet unpersuaded that the condemnation imposed by the justice tin beryllium described arsenic manifestly excessive specified that we should interfere.”

During the trial, the tribunal heard that Ogonowska had suffered PTSD arsenic a effect of having been raped successful 2015 erstwhile she was 14. Her alleged rapist was not prosecuted and, astatine her ain trial, Farrell accepted the prosecution’s relationship – relying partially connected Facebook messages betwixt Ogonowska and her alleged attacker – that the intercourse was consensual, contempt her age.

Justice for Women has described Ogonowska arsenic a “double unfortunate of a misogynist justness system”. Harriet Wistrich, a solicitor and the manager of the Centre for Women’s Justice, wrote successful 2022 that the case “raises superior questions astir whether prosecutors are pursuing their ain guidance connected rape myths erstwhile an alleged unfortunate becomes a defendant”.

However, Stuart-Smith said Farrell was entitled to cull Ognowowska’s relationship of her alleged rape.

“It was a pugnacious determination for the justice to take, but helium had the well-documented advantages that travel from being the proceedings justice and this tribunal is neither entitled nor successful a presumption to overturn his finding,” Stuart-Smith wrote.

“That being so, the disapproval that the justice failed to person respect to the interaction of the rape connected the applicant’s PTSD and her culpability erstwhile committing the execution falls away.

“What the justice did was to admit a grade of trauma which lowered her culpability for the sidesplitting portion not providing the partial defence of diminished responsibility.”

Farrell recognised successful his sentencing that Ogonowska had suffered erstwhile trauma but said it was “probably the operation of the effect of being moved from Poland, wherever you were residing arsenic a child, to this state astatine the property of 12, the bullying that you suffered astatine school, the post-natal slump that you undoubtedly suffered pursuing the commencement of your kid and the pressures of trying to integrate into this society”.

The tribunal of entreaty said Farrell had rightly recognised “significant features of idiosyncratic mitigation” which caused him to determination the minimum word down from the starting constituent of 25 years.