This made him a particularly easy target for scape-goating. The Roma belong to the most socially deprived stratum in Hungary. They are the butt of jokes. Prejudices concerning them abound. According to the stereotype that lies buried in the murkier depths of the Hungarian collective consciousness, they are lazy, dishonest, dirty, thieving, stupid, uneducated troublemakers.
Gypsies are particularly prone to crime, the assumption goes.
Once charges had been brought against him, no one would ever question his guilt. An open and shut case. Secondly, there is the issue of the difference between lawyers a client chooses for himself and those appointed to act in a client's defence where the client is too impecunious to be able to afford one or too uninterested in the outcome of the case to want to bother making the effort to find one. He replied that he had indeed tried in vain to persuade his client to contest the result but had to respect his client's wishes. What Mr Bodnar did not say is that, in such cases, if the appointed lawyers decide to pursue the case further, they face a thankless task which also happens to be poorly paid.