Jailed billionaire’s death stirs new debate about justice and prison conditions in Romania

Romania’s former President Traian Basescu and the Social Democratic Party’s leader Liviu Dragnea reacted to businessman Dan Adamescu’s death yesterday. They brought into question once again alleged abuses by the judicial authorities and the bad detention conditions in Romania. Basescu, Dragnea, and other top politicians have been speaking in the last months about alleged abuses of the anticorruption prosecutors, aimed at neutralizing the country’s political and business elite. The public debate about the local justice system and the fight against corruption has intensified in recent weeks as the new Parliament announced that it planned to change some laws and re-establish the balance of power in Romania. Last week, the Government presented an emergency ordinance to pardon thousands of convicts, presented as a solution to the problem of overcrowded local prisons, and another one that brings some important changes to the criminal law, namely the way some corruption crimes are defined. Dan Adamescu, who was sent to prison in May 2016 with a sentence of 4 years and 4 months for bribing two judges, died at a private hospital on Monday night. He had been in hospital for over a month, but his family was only granted limited visiting rights. A local court rejected his parole request in November although he had served a third of his sentence and his health condition was bad. His son, Alexander Adamescu, said that his death was likely caused by the infection with the Staphylococcus aureus, which he got while incarcerated. Former President Traian Basescu, who was supported by Adamescu’s media group while in power although he claims he only met the businessman a few times, blames the prosecutors and judges for his death. “This man was killed by the contempt for life of the prosecutors and judges, without someone having sentenced him to death,” Traian Basescu wrote in a Facebook post, questioning the anticorruption prosecutors’ opposition to Adamescu’s release on parole. He also suggested that the judges who ruled on Adamescu’s parole request were intimidated by the DNA prosecutors into rejecting it. “Do we know how many tens or hundreds of simple people, unknown but sick, die every year in penitentiaries due to the prosecutors’ and the judges’ content for the inmates’ lives? They are simple people, not millionaires like Adamescu, and die unknown,” Basescu wrote. PSD leader Liviu Dragnea, whose party supports the ordinance to pardon over 3,000 inmates in Romania just to have fewer people in local prisons, asked the Justice Ministry to announce how many people have died in local prisons. “Last night, a man died in prison,” Dragnea said on Tuesday, referring to Adamescu’s death. “As far as I know, that man wasn’t convicted to death,” Dragnea said, according to