The paper discusses the execution of the laws of the 3rd Plenum of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party (KC PZPR) (11–13 November 1949) in terms of verifying its members on the example of Julian Sekita (1897–1989) – a lawyer with pre–war experience in the judiciary – the first President of Regional Court in Olsztyn in the years 1945–1949. From the viewpoint of particular Party members or candidates that were affected by the cleansing of ranks, both the content of the accusations and the mechanism of deciding on their exclusion were crucial. Depriving someone of the Party card while the totalitarian state was being built often meant losing their professional standing and actual elimination from the broadly understood public sphere. In practice, it led to defensive mechanisms among the excluded, such as appeals to Party instances directly superior to the basic organisations. Eventually, the decisions on approving, changing or repealing the punishments belonged to voivodeship–level Party control committees. It was a crucial issue, especially for those Party members who faced charges of ideological nature that situated them in the category of class enemies.