The article presents results of file research invovling an analysis of the manner in which court and prosecution applied law in resolving atypical cases of bribery. The subject of the said research were atypical cases of bribery involving crimes under Article 228 and Article 229 of the Penal Code perpetrated by persons performing public functions. The cases discussed fol-lowed a number of varied scenarios which, in general, consisted in accepting or granting ma-terial or personal benefit or a promise of such in connection with the perpetrator's official capicity. Hence the conduct of the perpetrator did formally fulfil the definition of the crime defined in Articles 228 and 229 Penal Code. However, since some specific circumstances took place, such as a statutory body's decision or penal jurisprudence, the perpetrated act should not render the perpetrator liable to prosecution. It was found that, when classifying atypical acts of corruption, judicial authorities made some effort to employ lenient penal-legal assessment of the perpetrator's conduct, but they often did so with insufficient diligence and by implementing inappropriate provisions of the penal law. The atypical bribery cases included circumstances in which physicians misled their patients by suggesting they should purchase a high-end endoprothesis or medicine produced abroad, on an allegedly free market outside the National Health Fund (NFZ) refunding system. The patients they did so, in spite of the fact that such recommendations have no substantiation in the public functions of a medical doctor. Physicians would then claim that they assumed the role of an intermediary between a patient and a foreign dealer or manufacturer. In practice, they used prothesis or medicines refunded by the National Health Fund (NFZ). Unaware of that fact, patients acted in error as to the circumstances, fulfilling the definition of an unlawful act (error facti), and in particular, the patients were not aware that the money they handed over was in fact a bribe granted in connection with official capacity of the physician. In consequence, the criminal procedure in such cases should either be closed by means of discontinuation or refusal to instigate under Article 17 § 1.2 Criminal Procedure Code subject to Article 28 § 1 Penal Code. Prosecution bodies, however, avoided such classification and in cases like that opted for exempting the informer - briber from the penalty (Article 229 § 6 Penal Code), which did not fully reflect the actual legal and formal circumstances of a misinformed patient's conduct. Especially disagreeable was the fact that the solution adopted by prosecution assumed such patients were guilty. It was established that the notion of customary gifts, widely accepted in penal law publications as lawful excuse, is in practice defunct. This does not mean that similar facts were never subject to criminal procedure. It did happen, though sporadically, and the usual practice employed by courts and prosecution in this respect was to classify the perpetrator's conduct as act of lesser importance, both in case of a bribe offered (Article 229 § 2 Penal Code) or bribery acceptance by a person of official capacity (Article 228 § 2 Penal Code), or as an act of minor social harmfulness (Article 1 § 2 Penal Code) and discontinuation of pro-ceedings under Article 17 § 1.3) Code of Penal Procedure. It is therefore proposed, de lege ferenda, to codify a catalogue of customary gifts to be treated as justified. The lack of a legal and substantive basis (that would be well grounded in codified law) of such justified custom-ary items in codified laws seems to be the main reason behind the fact that judiciary authori-ties are reluctant to employ this penal law notion in relevant factual circumstances. In a different group of the analysed cases, i.e. such involving discontinuation of crimi-nal procedure or refusal to instigate criminal procedure due to minor social harm of an act (Article 1 § 2 Penal Code), the analysis conducted allows to conclude that the border between classifying an act as one of minor social danger or act of lesser significance is liquid and it actually remains at the discretion of the person issuing the verdict to decide where the bound-ary is. Taking into consideration the results of a parallel research on minor corruption cases among government officials, it may be concluded that in largely similar factual circumstances, the conduct of both perpetrators (the person granting and the person accepting a bribe) was classified sometimes as acts of lesser significance, sometimes as acts of minor social harm. In practice, this means that in similar factual circumstances, the conduct of the perpetrator was sometimes deemed a crime, and sometimes it was not.