Ex-President’s Murder Trial Is Set to Begin

WARSAW —  Former Communist leader Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, facing murder charges in the crushing of 1970 labor strikes, suffered two legal setbacks Thursday when a judge rejected efforts to delay the trial and refused to allow defense attorneys to quit.

The judge ordered the formal trial to begin today and barred Jaruzelski’s lawyers from stepping down until new attorneys are in place.

In an added public relations blow for the 77-year-old former leader, one of his lawyers has become caught up in controversy over a long-ago shooting. Polish media reported Wednesday that in the 1970s, the attorney--then a prosecutor in the Communist regime--shot and killed a child while drunk but never served prison time.

Jaruzelski and 11 co-defendants are accused of actions, including issuing illegal orders for the use of firearms, that led to the deaths of at least 44 protesters three decades ago.

Jaruzelski, who was defense minister at the time, went on to head the Polish United Workers Party and later served as the nation’s president during the 1989-90 transition to democracy. Since then, he has lived in comfortable retirement, reviled by some Poles and respected by others.

Speaking in the Warsaw court Thursday, Jaruzelski insisted that he wants the trial to proceed so he can prove his innocence.

“I am interested in this trial taking place because in the media sense, in the social sense, the verdict has already been passed on me and on my colleagues sitting here,” he declared. “It’s being said, quoting names, without any proof, ‘They led a massacre. They ordered the shooting of workers.’ ”

Presiding judge Piotr Wachowicz, responding to a defense request that the indictment be deemed legally flawed and sent back to prosecutors, ruled that the document’s shortcomings “are not so important that it would make conducting court proceedings impossible.”

Media Focuses on Lawyer Who Shot Boy

Jaruzelski’s lawyers, Witold Rozwens and Kazimierz Lojewski, then told the judge that they were resigning from the case, and Jaruzelski asked for court-appointed counsel. A change in his legal team could cause long delays in the trial as new attorneys familiarize themselves with an estimated 200 volumes of documents in the case.

Rozwens, 70, said he wanted to resign in part because he believes the indictment as written guarantees that the trial will not be concluded during his professional career. Legal experts have estimated that the trial will run at least two years but could take as many as 15.

Rozwens also cited media coverage of the 1970s shooting incident, in which he received a three-year suspended sentence after being convicted of unintentionally killing a child.

The respected Rzeczpospolita daily newspaper reported that Rozwens was visiting a summer resort and shot a 3-year-old boy while intending to shoot a dog in the yard of a neighboring house.

“Rozwens’ behavior throughout the court case was striking,” Rzeczpospolita reported. “He did not show any remorse, and he blamed the parents of the child, saying they did not take proper care of the child. He did not want to pay any compensation. . . . Now Gen. Jaruzelski chose him as his lawyer.”

The incident underscored the kind of people who ran Poland under communism, the newspaper said.

Child’s Mother Recounts Slaying in TV Interview

The private TVN television network added further details in a Wednesday broadcast that included an interview with the boy’s mother in the village where the killing took place. That report said that Rozwens was drunk at the time of the incident and wanted to shoot the dog because it had gone after the carcass of an animal he had shot while hunting.

The boy’s mother stated that Rozwens had at first only injured her son but that he then fired again to finish him off because it was dishonorable for a hunter to leave a wounded animal. Her comments did not make it clear whether she thought that Rozwens realized he was shooting a child, not a dog, when he fired the second time.

Rozwens has said that although he did not serve prison time for the incident, he paid a price for it in other ways, including in his career. The media attacks on him deeply upset his family, he said Thursday. “My wife got sick, and my son left the house because he couldn’t listen to it any longer,” he said.

While the details are dramatically different, the Rozwens incident and the Jaruzelski court case resonate with the issue of whether this country’s old Communist elite should be able to escape punishment for what many Poles consider serious crimes.

Of the 11 co-defendants named with Jaruzelski, three have been excused from court for ill health. The other most prominent figures are Stanislaw Kociolek, deputy prime minister at the time of the strikes, and Tadeusz Tuczapski, the deputy defense minister.