Judge Leonid Pendyura Sanctioned for Negligence in Child Case

The High Council of Justice has brought to disciplinary responsibility Leonid Pendyura, a judge of the Bilyaevsky District Court of Odesa Oblast, and imposed a disciplinary sanction in the form of a reprimand with deprivation of the right to receive additional payments to the judge's salary for one month.

This was reported by the press service of the High Council of Justice.

In turn, the publication "Slidstvo.Info" reported that the judge was punished for sending a child to an educational institution because she gave false testimony in court. The fact is that the Prosecutor General's Office is convinced that Pendyura actually deprived her of her liberty in this way, although the girl should not have been held responsible for her actions because she was under 16 years old.

"The judge was obviously negligent. The child in this case (and this is a fact proven by the court of appeal) should not have been held liable at all. The consequence of the judge's decision was the forced detention of the child, first in a reception center, then in a special institution for almost a year. The only reason for applying this most severe educational measure to the child was that the child was registered with the children's service due to the mother's evasion of her duties. And, as the court found, it was Yana who was raising her younger sisters and brother," said Dmytro Vegera, Deputy Head of the Department for Protection of Children in Conflict with the Law of the Prosecutor General's Office.

The Court of Appeal overturned Pendyura's decision, but by that time the child had already been in the institution for about a year. The judge himself admitted his mistake and suggested that it was due to the high workload. According to him, at that time he had 1,394 cases in the proceedings.

Кирило Бойко