Słupsk court jails Piotr Ogrodniczuk for 12 years over 2018 hotel window death

Verdict in Słupsk

The Słupsk Regional Court convicted Piotr Ogrodniczuk, 49, of killing Jacek B. and sentenced him to 12 years in prison on Thursday, 15 October 2026. Prosecutors had asked for 25 years, while the defence argued for an acquittal. The court also ordered him to pay more than 50,000 zloty in court costs. Ogrodniczuk, who agreed to the publication of his full name and image, has rejected the court's findings and announced an appeal, maintaining that he is innocent. He said:

This is some kind of farce.

The 2018 incident

Prosecutors charged Ogrodniczuk with beating Jacek B. across his body on 23 November 2018 and pushing him out of a window of room 316 at Hotel Słupsk, with a television tied to his neck. The window was on the third floor, and Jacek B. died the following day from injuries to several organs. At the retrial, the court relied on a 3D animation analysis carried out in a laboratory. The expert team concluded that the most probable version was that the victim, standing on a couch with his back to the window, was pushed out. That finding overturned a private expert opinion which had suggested the injuries could have come from hitting the pavement, and the court rejected the suicide theory put forward by the defence.

The defence account

Ogrodniczuk has never admitted the killing at any stage. At trial he said he slept in the hotel room after an evening of drinking with Jacek B. and a witness, Anna T., and that a woman's screams woke him. He said he then got dressed and left. He argued that the most probable explanation was that Jacek B., who was in a "difficult life situation", took his own life. The court said his explanations did not deserve belief. Anna T. had been the key witness in the first trial, when she named Ogrodniczuk as the perpetrator. Her testimony changed at the retrial after she spoke with the defendant's lawyer, who was later removed from the case, and the court found her account matched the objectively gathered evidence.

The court's reasoning

Judge Aleksandra Szumińska, who read the verdict, said the evidence pointed to the defendant's authorship of the act. She described the crime as having a drastic course, noting that the defendant had been intoxicated and had effectively fled the scene. In her view, he had violated the most precious good, human life. She used these points to justify the length of the sentence. She put the core finding this way:

The evidence gathered in this case points to the defendant's authorship and to acting with direct intent to kill.

Procedural history

The case was tried twice. The first trial ended in June 2021 with a 10-year sentence from the Słupsk District Court, which the Gdańsk Court of Appeal overturned in April 2022. The retrial began in Słupsk on 3 November 2022. Ogrodniczuk spent almost four years in custody and has been at liberty for more than three years. Thursday's verdict can still be challenged on appeal, so the sentence is not final.