The Court of Appeal has upheld the sentence handed down to a 28-year-old resident of Lviv Region, who was jailed for 13 years for raping his underage niece. This was reported by the Lviv Regional Prosecutor’s Office.
According to the verdict of the court of first instance, at the beginning of June last year, in one of the villages of the Yavoriv District, the man, being intoxicated, raped a 13-year-old girl at night. The previous evening, he had stayed overnight at his sister’s house, where she lived with her family.
At around four in the morning, the convicted man entered the room where his niece was sleeping and, taking advantage of his physical superiority and the child’s frightened state, committed against her a crime provided for in Part 4 of Article 152 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. After the man was startled by footsteps outside the door, he left the room, and the girl ran out into the street, trying to escape from her attacker.
The man began to pursue the teenager, but she managed to lock herself in the summer kitchen and stayed there until morning, while the attacker fled. In the morning, her parents found the child in a state of distress and called the police and medics. Law enforcement officers quickly established the man’s whereabouts and detained him under Article 208 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine.
In April this year, the court of first instance sentenced the man to 13 years’ imprisonment and ordered that information about him be entered into the Unified Register of Persons Convicted of Crimes against the Sexual Freedom and Sexual Integrity of a Young Child. The defence appealed the verdict, insisting on reclassifying his actions as a less serious offence, punishable by up to five years of restriction or deprivation of liberty.
However, the Court of Appeal, having taken into account the evidence submitted by the prosecution and the position of the prosecutors of the Lviv Regional Prosecutor’s Office, dismissed the defence’s appeal and upheld the verdict of the court of first instance.