ABSTRACT
On 22 April 2009, the Polish Supreme Court confirmed a sentence passed against militia functionaries who, on December 16, 1981, shot nine miners and wounded twenty-one while putting down a “Solidarity” strike at the “Wujek” mine. The platoon commander was sentenced to six years in prison and his fourteen subordinates to two-and-a-half to three years. More than twelve months later, on September 15, 2010, the same court validated a verdict (of one-and-a-half to two years) passed against two functionaries who, on May 3, 1983, participated in a police attack carried out in Warsaw, involving a church charity organization. The two individuals assaulted the persons present there at the time and then they took them in a lorry out of town and left them at night in a forest. It would be certainly worthwhile to consider the type and scale of the two crimes as well as the severity of the sentences. The most interesting fact, however, is that in the first case, the prosecutor’s office began its work in 1991. In the second case, it was in 1993. In other words, the whole legal procedure lasted eighteen and seventeen years, respectively. This was a sufficiently long period for Poles born after the fall of communism to reach adulthood and an age of legal and civic maturity (e.g., voting age).
