It is a rarity in the legal system that a case has to be opened three times from the beginning. A 23-year-old was killed six years ago. Your family is struggling to come to an appropriate judgment.
Osnabrück – For the third time the same violent crime will be going on in court: On September 12, 2015, a rapist who had been convicted of several times was released from the Rehburg penal system in Lower Saxony.
When he returns from his bike trip, a 23-year-old jogger is lying dead in the nearby forest at Loccum Monastery. Six years later, the case remains open and a new murder charge begins.
The district court of Osnabrück will have to try the crime again from the beginning on Wednesday (September 8th), because two earlier judgments have not left the family of the dead in peace. And twice the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) granted the appeals to the relatives: The Verden district court did not do justice to the case.
BGH rejects two judgments
The BGH only rejected the 2017 conviction of the suspect to eleven and a half years in prison for manslaughter with preventive detention. Then he overturned a surprising acquittal in 2019. As a consequence, the case was referred to Osnabrück for the third hearing (Az. 6 Ks 5/21).
The public prosecutor’s office had also appealed against the acquittal. The Verden Chamber had acquitted the defendants for lack of evidence. But the BGH, as the highest German criminal court, did not let that stand. “An assessment of evidence that ignores serious suspicions is legally flawed,” said the ruling of the 3rd Criminal Senate from March 2021.
Evidence unclear
The chamber in Verden did not take sufficient account of the previous history of the now 53-year-old sex offender, and did not examine possible similarities to other offenses. The judges also ignored the most incriminating evidence: a crumpled piece of chewing gum paper with traces of genes from the perpetrator, which was found at the crime scene. The judges had argued at the time that it could not be determined with certainty when the man threw away the paper at this point. The desperate father found his daughter in this place, far from all roads, in 2015 when he was combed through the forest on his own.
In the acquittal, testimony also played a different role than in the first trial. The judges gave two witnesses more faith in the trial. They claim to have seen the victim accompanied by an unknown young man.
The charges against the 53-year-old in Osnabrück are again murder. It is a rarity in the legal system that a case has to be tried three times in court. dpa
