[5][6] On 13 May 2016, 22-year-old Mariusz Frontczak escaped from a police patrol while handcuffed during an attempted arrest to enforce his sentence for the possession of drugs.

From there he went to the Wrocław's main square, where he continued to wander, bringing the attention of the operator of the city's camera surveillance.

[12] This autopsy also failed to determine the direct cause of death, however it was difficult to make a reliable assessment because Stachowiak's body was already in a bad condition, the decomposition processes having worn off skin alterations and outer injuries.

[1] On 20 May 2017, TVN24 aired a documentary by Wojciech Bojanowski about the death of Igor Stachowiak and the surrounding events as part of its Superwizjer investigative journalism TV series, revealing the previously undisclosed recordings from the camera built into the taser.

[16] Day after the airing, the National Police Headquarters released a statement stating that the use of force and taser and the subsequent usage of handcuffs were adequate to the situation and Stachowiak's behavior and that all the circumstances surrounding the arrest were justified.

On the same day, the National Public Prosecutor's Office also released a statement, explaining that the length of the ongoing investigation of Stachowiak's death is due to the realization of motions for evidence made by Stachowiak's parents, and that for that reason it is necessary to obtain opinions of expert witnesses from a specialized forensic laboratory.

The statement said that only after the opinions are obtained it will be possible to make an informed decision and bring charges to the suspects, because the evidence obtained so far allows to presume with a high probability that Stachowiak died from cardiorespiratory failure with arrhythmia after an episode of excited delirium caused by taking psychoactive drugs, as the forensic examination showed the presence of amphetamine and tramadol.

The sixth officer who took part in the activities related to Stachowiak's arrest quit the job in the previous year.

Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights filed an amicus brief for the case, arguing that the recording of the arrest constituted journalism.

The court acquitted the witness on 30 September 2019, having found no evidence for the crime in the recordings from the mobile phones and city surveillance cameras.

[25] On 22 February 2021, the Polish Ombudsman Adam Bodnar also filed a cassation appeal,[26] requesting for a reconsideration of the case, stating that the courts "did it badly and cursorily" when assessing the responsibility of the police officers, and "minimized the blame" by not deeming the taser as the direct cause of death.

In the appeal, Bodnar wrote that the court based its view on the cause of the death on only one expert opinion without investigating whether it is a good explanation in the case of a person who received electric shocks, and that the court did not take into account the opinions of other experts and witnesses that, according to Bodnar, ruled out that Stachowiak was in a state of extreme agitation.

[5][6] In an interview for TVN24 on 21 May 2017, Bodnar said that he has "absolutely no doubt" that Igor Stachowiak was tortured and his treatment by the police officers was a "blatant violation of civil rights".

[28] On 29 May 2017, Amnesty International sent an open letter to the Minister of the Interior and Administration Mariusz Błaszczak and the Public Prosecutor General Zbigniew Ziobro, pointing out the overt length of the proceedings regarding Stachowiak's death and pointing out that an unambiguous public promise to hold the involved persons responsible was brought about only after the recordings from the police station were revealed by a TV station.

On the basis of these recordings, Amnesty International ascertained that Stachowiak was subject to activities that meet the definition of torture in the Article 1 of the United Nations Convention Against Torture, stating that the police officers used a taser to force confessions and humiliate Stachowiak, that they caused him physical and mental suffering in order to coerce him to a specific behavior, and moreover that using a taser against a handcuffed person was directly in contradiction to Article 25 Paragraph 3 of the Act on the Means of Physical Coercion and Firearms (Ustawa o środkach przymusu bezpośredniego i broni palnej).

[29][30] In an article for Dziennik.pl, Patryk Słowik criticized National Police Headquarters's statement, commenting that Article 6 of the Act on the Means of Physical Force and Firearms states that force is used in a manner that is necessary to achieve the goals, proportional to the threat level, and choosing the means that possibly cause the lowest affliction.

Słowik criticized the National Public Prosecutor's Office statement, arguing that running motions for evidence do not preclude applying precautionary measures like suspension in duties and pretrial detention, yet bringing charges is a precondition for that, and furthermore that no legal article requires processing all evidence to bring charges against a suspect.

[31] Łukasz Cieśla and Tomasz Pajączek from Onet.pl criticized the prosecutors and courts for basing their opinion that excited delirium was the cause of death primarily on a testimony of a team of expert witnesses that had never examined Stachowiak's body.

Another interviewed psychiatrist, prof. Piotr Gałecki, described excited delirium as a "certain hypothesis, conjecture, attempt to find an answer to the question why people sometimes die during police interventions", because "in the USA it sometimes happened that a correct use of police force resulted in death of the detainee", and that excited delirium "is a certain view, not a firm stance", and that "it is not scientifically confirmed".