Case description
On March 17, 2021, the HACC found former judge Vadym Halichyi from Dnipro guilty of abuse of influence. He promised a resident to influence the investigators of the Dnipro police for a bribe. Halichyi was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison.
Vadym Halichyi was working as a judge since 2009, he was appointed to this position by Viktor Yushchenko. In 2017, after the crime, the HCJ dismissed him from his post, and in 2020, it did it again because the Supreme Court overturned the previous decision.
The crime took place in October 2016. According to the investigation, then judge Halichyi took a bribe of USD 10,000 from the Dnipro resident. For this money, he had to influence the investigators of one of the Dnipro police departments to close criminal proceedings against him under the appeals of the former wife of the resident.
Halichyi was detained on the day of transferring the bribe near a café in Dnipro, where it happened; he was the first judge to be detained after the restriction of judicial immunity. The following day, he was searched: more than USD 54,000, about EUR 13,000, and almost UAH 138,000 in cash were found in Halichyi's house.
At the hearing, the ex-judge did not admit his guilt and said the opposite. Allegedly, he helped this man find a lawyer for USD 10,000, which would help resolve the issues under the civil cases. However, the local himself did not confirm this version.
The actions of the ex-judge were qualified under Article 369-2, part 2 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. Halichyi was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison, with a ban on holding certain positions for 3 years.
The HACC Appeals Chamber subsequently reduced the ex-judge's main sentence to 2.5 years of imprisonment because he had two minor children and because of some other mitigating circumstances that were not considered when sentencing him.
Halichyi was in prison for almost a year and a half, but one of the Dnipro district courts released him early in the summer of 2022. This is one of the cases when local courts release HACC convicts based on evaluative concepts, such as “embarked on the path of correction” or “proved their correction.”
When the case of the ex-judge continued to be heard by the Supreme Court, Halichyi managed to mobilize into the ranks of the Armed Forces; this did not prevent him from participating in the hearings. Thus, the Supreme Court overturned the decision of the appellate instance and ordered a new appeal hearing of this case; the cassation appeal referred to “significant violations of the criminal procedural law.”
During the new hearing, the HACC appeal suspended the hearing of the case precisely because Halichyi serves in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The consideration will be resumed as soon as he is discharged from military service.
