Prague’s municipal court, the first-instance court, on 14 September 2026 acquitted Jiri Toul of marijuana trafficking for the third time, ruling the evidence was insufficient for conviction.[1] Prosecutor Simona Krupova appealed the acquittal and asked Prague’s High Court, the appellate court, to quash the judgment and order a different municipal-court panel to retry the case.[1] Defence lawyer Jiri Solil opposed removing the case from its lawful judges, invoking the constitutional guarantee that no one may be removed from their lawful judge.[1] Prague’s High Court set a public hearing for December to decide the prosecutor’s request to quash the September acquittal.[1]
Toul is charged over eleven alleged marijuana deals in 2018 and 2019 in which prosecutors say he supplied Thomas Zens, who carried the drugs to Germany, while Toul says the trade ran in the opposite direction.[1] The same municipal court had originally sentenced Toul in January 2023 to eight years in prison and a 450,000-koruna fine, a judgment the High Court quashed, after which repeated acquittals were also quashed on appeal.[1] The September judgment accepted that objective evidence proved Toul’s relationship and contacts with Zens, Zens’s trips to the Czech Republic for marijuana, and Toul’s contact with the seized shipment’s packaging.[1] The court said DNA traces on several packages undermined Toul’s account of buying only a small amount for personal use but alone did not establish the direction of the transaction.[1] The court found that no objective evidence captured an actual handover, an agreement on price and quantity, a payment for a consignment, or communication clearly showing Toul as the seller.[1] The defence says years of police monitoring captured no concrete marijuana deal, a later house search was negative, no sample of the alleged drug was secured in ten of the eleven cases, and the prosecution did not establish the origin of about twenty kilograms Toul allegedly handled.[1]
The case is unfolding as the government backed a criminal-procedure amendment that would stop an appellate court after quashing a judgment from dictating how the first-instance court evaluates evidence and makes factual findings, while tightening removal of a case from its original judge.[1] Justice Minister Jeronym Tejc said higher courts should not bind lower courts on guilt after supplementing evidence themselves, presenting the change as strengthening first-instance independence.[1]
