Reading the Adli Rapor After a Turkish Traffic Accident — which line raises the sentence, and which one keeps the complaint

The adli rapor is the forensic medical report on the injured person, and in a Turkish road file it is usually the one document that decides how the case is classified. It is not a doctor's letter describing injuries in prose. It is an answer sheet. Its headings track the wording of the Penal Code almost word for word, so that a prosecutor can read the answers straight onto a paragraph number.

There are normally two. The first is written in the emergency department within hours, on what is visible that night. The definitive report follows once treatment and healing have run their course, sometimes months later, and where the two differ the file follows the later one. A first report silent about a fracture is not a finding that there was none, only that none had been identified yet.

Two things follow. Your file can be reclassified upwards long after you were released, and often after you left the country. And a report is expert evidence, answerable in the ways the Code provides, not a fact handed down.

The heading most people fix on is the one asking whether the injury can be remedied by simple medical intervention — basit tıbbi müdahale ile giderilebilir, usually shortened to BTM, answered yes or no. In a deliberate assault it is the most consequential line in the document, because TCK 86/2 gives intentional injury of that lightness its own reduced range of six months to one year six months, or a judicial fine, and only on the complaint of the victim.

Negligent injury has no equivalent paragraph. TCK 89 contains no reduced range for injuries at the BTM level, so a "yes" on that line does not lower what you face. The first paragraph of TCK 89 — four months to two years' imprisonment or a judicial fine — already absorbs everything the aggravating paragraphs do not catch, from a graze to a soft-tissue injury that took two months of physiotherapy.

So the answer that matters is not on the BTM line. It is on the lines under it.

Three paragraphs sit above the first, and the report's findings are what put you in one of them.

Read the pairs closely. Weakening of the function of an eye or an ear adds half; loss of that function doubles. A fixed mark on the face adds half; a permanent alteration of the face doubles. One word apart in a medical opinion, and the upper limit moves from three years to four.

TCK 89/5 makes investigation and prosecution of negligent injury dependent on a complaint, then withdraws that protection in one narrow case: where the offence was committed with conscious negligence and the injury is not one falling within the first paragraph. Both conditions must hold.

So the report decides half of the question. While the findings keep the injury inside the first paragraph, the file needs a complaint however the driving is characterised, and the injured party can end it by withdrawing. Once a fracture or a condition endangering life is recorded, the complaint stops being decisive if the prosecutor also alleges conscious negligence — foreseeing the result without wanting it, TCK 22/3, which by itself increases the sentence by one third to one half.

The clock runs separately. Under TCK 73/1 a complaint not made within six months bars investigation and prosecution, and under TCK 73/2 that period runs from the day the person entitled knew of the act and of the offender, not from the date of the collision. A definitive report issued four months later does not restart it.

The settlement route stays open either way: CMK 253/1-b-2 lists negligent injury under TCK 89 as a mediation offence whether or not it depends on a complaint, so uzlaştırma is offered in both situations. If the injuries prove fatal, the file leaves TCK 89 for negligent killing, where neither the complaint requirement nor mediation exists.

Three provisions govern what can be done about a report you say is wrong.

• CMK 67/5. Once the examination is complete, time is given to the prosecutor, the participating party, the suspect or accused and their counsel to ask for a fresh expert examination or to state objections. If that request is refused, a reasoned decision must be given within three days.
• CMK 67/6. The same people may obtain a scientific opinion from a specialist of their own, on the incident or on the report once it exists. No extra time may be requested on that ground alone.
• CMK 67/3. An expert may not go beyond matters requiring special or technical knowledge, and may not make the legal characterisations that belong to the judge. A report concluding that an injury "falls within TCK 89/2" has crossed that line: the finding is medical, the paragraph is the court's.

The objections that carry weight are narrow. Whether the imaging supports a fresh fracture rather than an old one. Whether "permanent" weakening was assessed before treatment had finished. Whether the injured person's own medical history, often held abroad and never translated, was before the examining doctor at all. Where the paragraph is genuinely disputed the file can go to the Council of Forensic Medicine for an institutional opinion.

Two years is the figure that makes this concrete. A pronounced sentence of two years or less can be deferred under CMK 231, on conditions that include the loss having been made good — see deferral and suspension. A first-paragraph finding keeps the whole statutory range inside that ceiling; a third-paragraph finding, doubled, puts the upper half of it beyond. How the offence, the complaint and the settlement fit together is set out on the practice area page for traffic accidents causing injury.