20 July 2016<\/a>). Again questions concerned whether he had been an informer, which he vehemently denied even in the face of a definite identification by his former contact officers. Degner today appeared with a new witness counsel, but remained true to his strategy of simply denying this fact. Victims counsel accordingly decided not to ask their prepared questions concerning his activities and reports as an informer. Degner could leave the courtroom rather early in the day and return home \u2013 there to prepare for the inevitable perjury trial, which had been put on ice for the duration of his testimony in Munich.<\/p>\nNext up was the statement by the Zsch\u00e4pe defense on questions by victims counsel \u2013 which Zsch\u00e4pe simply refuses to answer. It is now up to the court to decide whether it wants to pose some of these many detailed questions as its own questions \u2013 thus also showing to what extent it is really interested in clearing up the NSU and its crimes.<\/p>\n
Victims counsel than began to bring a motion for evidence concerning a letter which Zsch\u00e4pe had sent in 2013 to a Neonazi detained in a prison in North Rhine-Westphalia. This letter had been sent by the prison authorities to the domestic secret service, which had then sent it on to the federal prosecutors, who had included it in the case file. In it, Zsch\u00e4pe presents herself as strong, self-assured and hard-nosed \u2013 quite in contrast to her in-court statement presenting the clich\u00e9 of a weak, alcoholic woman dependent on the two men.<\/p>\n
Given the contents of the letter, the reactions by the defense are probably unsurprising: first off, they moved that the court move into nun-public session already while the motion was being read out \u2013 the legal debate concerning whether to do so also had to be held in nun-public session.<\/p>\n
In that sessions, parties were to present their arguments on whether to exclude the public from the further reading of the motion \u2013 arguments focused on weighing the privacy interests of the accused versus the information interests of the public in the matters presented in the motion and the letter itself. The defense could have presented arguments why they felt that the letter \u2013 which contains a self-representation by Zsch\u00e4pe vis-\u00e0-vis an imprisoned Neonazi \u2013 contained particularly intimate details, in response to which victims counsel would have argued why there was an interest of the public precisely to learn about this type of unfiltered self-representation, not based on a defense strategy and made to fit the contents of the case file. (The letter has, by the way, already been published in the press).<\/p>\n
Instead of presenting such arguments, the defense began to throw smokescreens, claiming that it had been illegal to put the letter in the case file and that therefore the motion for evidence, which quoted parts of the letter, could not be read out in court at all, not even in a non-public session \u2013 this despite the fact that the letter has been in the case file for years. Of course, already the basis for believing the letter to be in the case file illegally is rather sketchy \u2013 further discussion showed that the defense had not even looked at the provisions cited as legal basis for this step by the prosecution. And above all: even if the letter was put in the case file illegally, this might potentially lead to a prohibition of using it as evidence in the verdict \u2013 but certainly not to a prohibition of a party merely bringing a motion that it be considered as evidence.<\/p>\n
These proceedings once more show the defense aware of its precarious procedural position in the face of the damning evidence presented so far, and trying to keep the contents of letter, which after all contradict Zsch\u00e4pe\u2019s representation of herself in court, out of the trial at all cost.
\nWhat also became clear was that the relationship of trust between Zsch\u00e4pe and her counsel Heer, Stahl and Sturm is not as damaged as often claimed \u2013 Zsch\u00e4pe had no problems talking to them about the issue today after it became clear that her new additional counsel were unwilling and\/or unable to take up this issue \u2013 counsel Borchert had already left the courtroom again at that point, while Grasel did not make any serious attempts to join in the debate. In pursuing concrete goals, such as in this case keeping the letter out of the trial, Zsch\u00e4pe thus seems to have no problems at all in contacting Heer, Stahl and Sturm. This once again shows that Zsch\u00e4pe\u2019s motions to relieve these three as counsel are based on purely tactical motives.
\nThe court has not yet decided on how to proceed with the motion, instead giving the parties until next week to present additional observations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Zsch\u00e4pe refuses to answer questions of victims counsel, and: a motion concerning a letter written by Zsch\u00e4pe leads to hectic activities by the defense. Today the court first finished the questioning of former Blood and Honour Thuringia head and secret service informer Marcel Degner (see, inter alia, the report of 20 July 2016). Again questions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allgemein"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1259"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1259\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1262,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1259\/revisions\/1262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}