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A woman who stabbed a man to death as he sexually assaulted her has lost an appeal against her 17-year jail term.
Martyna Ogonowska was handed a life sentence aged 18 after being convicted of the 2018 murder of Filip Jaskiewicz, 23, in a Peterborough car park, using a knife she said she carried for self protection.
Sentencing her at Cambridge crown court in 2019, Judge Farrell QC told Ogonowska that Jaskiewicz “undoubtedly touched you sexually and was violent to you shortly before he was killed”. But he said it did not qualify as self-defence because Ogonowska, who he accepted suffered from some mental disability and had experienced previous trauma, had taken a knife to the scene.
On Friday, the court of appeal rejected Ogonowska’s appeal against her sentence. An appeal against her conviction was rejected in 2023. Her lawyers had argued that the minimum jail terms should have been 12 to 13 years rather than 17 years.
In the court of appeal’s judgment, Lord Justice Stuart-Smith wrote: “However we approach it, this was still a heavy sentence for a young person with the applicant’s attributes to bear; but on the judge’s findings this was a serious crime even after all allowances and mitigation is taken into account. We are ultimately unpersuaded that the sentence imposed by the judge can be described as manifestly excessive such that we should interfere.”
During the trial, the court heard that Ogonowska had suffered PTSD as a result of having been raped in 2015 when she was 14. Her alleged rapist was not prosecuted and, at her own trial, Farrell accepted the prosecution’s account – relying partly on Facebook messages between Ogonowska and her alleged attacker – that the intercourse was consensual, despite her age.
Justice for Women has described Ogonowska as a “double victim of a misogynist justice system”. Harriet Wistrich, a solicitor and the director of the Centre for Women’s Justice, wrote in 2022 that the case “raises serious questions about whether prosecutors are following their own guidance on rape myths when an alleged victim becomes a defendant”.
However, Stuart-Smith said Farrell was entitled to reject Ognowowska’s account of her alleged rape.
“It was a tough decision for the judge to take, but he had the well-documented advantages that flow from being the trial judge and this court is neither entitled nor in a position to overturn his finding,” Stuart-Smith wrote.
“That being so, the criticism that the judge failed to have regard to the impact of the rape on the applicant’s PTSD and her culpability when committing the murder falls away.
“What the judge did was to acknowledge a degree of trauma which lowered her culpability for the killing while not providing the partial defence of diminished responsibility.”
Farrell recognised in his sentencing that Ogonowska had suffered previous trauma but said it was “probably the combination of the effect of being moved from Poland, where you were residing as a child, to this country at the age of 12, the bullying that you suffered at school, the post-natal depression that you undoubtedly suffered following the birth of your child and the pressures of trying to integrate into this society”.
The court of appeal said Farrell had rightly recognised “significant features of personal mitigation” which caused him to move the minimum term down from the starting point of 25 years.
