Polish murderer Waldemar Krakos was hanged on this date in 1983 in Warsaw’s Mokotow Prison.

With a partner, Wiktor Maliszewski, he’d bludgeoned and strangled a female taxi driver to death on New Year’s Eve 1982/83, yielding a few thousand zlotys to drink away before their arrest on New Year’s Day.

Both initially caught a term of years when judge (and the future President of the post-Communist Supreme Court) Lech Paprzycki found that Krakos’s traumatic childhood rendered him mentally unfit to hang; but amid public clamor the sentence against Krakos was upgraded in June by the Supreme Court. (Although his was not a political crime, Krakos’s treatment was facilitated by Poland’s early 80s martial law.)

Prior to his execution the killer met cinema director Krzysztof Kieslowski. Five years later, Kieslowski’s acclaimed Dekalog drama series explores, in Dekalog: Five, a capital punishment case very much like Krakos’s own.

That film’s portrayal of violent lumpen “Jacek Lazar” brutally murdering a taxi driver and suffering a brutal hanging in retribution has been credited with helping bring about the abolition of the death penalty in Poland. Krakos, as a result, is among the very last to suffer that punishment in Polish history.

On this day..

• 1614: Magdalena Weixler, "my innocence will come to light"
• 1796: Claude Javogues
• 1989: Jimmy Chua and his Pudu Prison siege accomplices
• 1783: Jacques Francois Paschal, rapist monk
• 1867: Not Santa Anna
• 1932: Lee Bong-chang, would-be Hirohito assassin
• Corpses Strewn: The Streltsy
• 1698: The Streltsy executions begin
• 1987: Eshan Nayeck, the last executed in Mauritius
• 1707: Johann Patkul, schemer
• 1800: Prosser's Gabriel, slave rebel
• 1923: Susan Newell, the last woman hanged in Scotland
• 1911: Several revolutionaries on Double Ten Day