Daily Archives: 11. November 2015

10 November 2015 – afternoon session

Challenges by the Wohlleben defense for alleged bias.

After a long interruption of the trial, the Wohlleben defense brought ist challenges for alleged bias against all judges. Interestingly, this challenge again was not simply based on the court’s failing to inform the parties about the announcement that Zschäpe would make a statement. Instead, attorneys Schneiders, Nahrath and Klemke first repeated at great length their earlier motions concerning the allegedly insufficient defense of Zschäpe and the court decisions rejecting those motions (see the reports of 8 October 2015, 13 October 2015 and 14 October 2015). At the time of those decisions, the court had already known that Zschäpe would make statement and had not told Heer, Stahl and Sturm, but the court had not stated this fact in its decisions. Thus the court had, in the eyes of the Wohlleben defense, “accepted” that procedural activities by Heer, Stahl and Sturm would be in opposition to the defense strategy of Grasel, this in order to receive Zschäpe’s statement “no matter what the cost”.

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