Today, the court first heard two more federal criminal police detectives concerning an aspect of Zsch\u00e4pe\u2019s in-court statement: Zsch\u00e4pe had commented on a bet with B\u00f6hnhardt in 2005 in which she had wagered \u201c200 cuts of video clips\u201d, claiming that this did not mean work on the \u201cPink Panther\u201d video with which the NSU claimed responsibility for its crimes, but rather the removal of advertisements from recordings of TV series.<\/p>\n
Both detectives confirmed what their colleague had already stated on Tuesday: There was no evidence pointing to the presence in the NSU apartment of a device which could have facilitated the removal of ads in the way described by Zsch\u00e4pe, above all not of a video recorder containing a hard drive \u2013 Zsch\u00e4pe, however, had twice referred to \u201cour hard drive recorder\u201d and \u201cthe hard drive in our recorder\u201d. While there is no irrefutable proof that Zsch\u00e4pe did in fact work on the Pink Panther video, the court is surely allowed to draw adverse conclusions from the fact that her statement on what she had done instead is far from plausible, as well as the fact that she has refused to answer questions on this issue.<\/p>\n
Defense counsel Grasel announced another defense statement on questions by the court for next Thursday. The presiding judge stated that he was planning to have expert witness Henning Sa\u00df give his expert opinion on Zsch\u00e4pe\u2019s state of mind and future dangerousness on 20 and 21 December. He also asked all parties to bring any remaining motions for evidence soon.<\/p>\n
These announcements led to protest from Zsch\u00e4pe\u2019s assigned counsel, who reported that they had employed \u201cexpert help\u201d in deal with Sa\u00df\u2019 preliminary written expert opinion \u2013 this likely means that they have commissioned a competing expert opinion \u2013 and that they did not expect to be finished with this process this year. It quickly became clear that presiding judge G\u00f6tzl is not very willing to give the defense additional time: he canceled the trial days next Tuesday and Wednesday \u201cto give the defense more time to prepare\u201d, in spite of the fact that counsel Stahl had announced that this would not help much as it was not counsel, but their outside expert who needed more time.<\/p>\n
The next weeks will show to what extent the court will actually speed up the trial.<\/p>\n
The Wohlleben defense brought another, again rather sloppily reasoned, motion for release from pretrial detention, based inter alia on the less than speedy way the court has conducted the trial recently. They also moved for an expert opinion on the believability of the statements of accused Carsten Schultze, which are very very incriminating to Wohlleben. This motion, as well, is far from persuasive, the defense seems to be trying to throw mud at Schultze and see what sticks.<\/p>\n
Unsurprisingly, the court rejected the propaganda motions by the Wohlleben defense concerning Hitler deputy Rudolf Hess (see the reports of\u00a013 October<\/a> and 23 November <\/a>2016), stating that it was not planning to base its judgment, which will concern itself with Wohlleben\u2019s acts and mens rea in 1999\/2000, on the Hess stickers found in Wohlleben\u2019s apartment in 2011 anyway. Of course, it won\u2019t have to anyway as Wohlleben had even taken part in Hess marches in the late 1990s, showing his ideological leanings at the time much more clearly than a sticker from 2011 ever could.<\/p>\n The federal prosecution moved that the motion by victims\u2019 counsel for the Yozgat family concerning a case of likely perjury by a secret service officer from Brandenburg (see the report of [link] 16 November 2016) be rejected \u2013 victims\u2019 counsel announced that they will likely reply next week.<\/p>\n The trial will continue next Thursday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Zsch\u00e4pe\u2019s statements shown to be implausible. And: is the court starting to conduct the trial speedily? Today, the court first heard two more federal criminal police detectives concerning an aspect of Zsch\u00e4pe\u2019s in-court statement: Zsch\u00e4pe had commented on a bet with B\u00f6hnhardt in 2005 in which she had wagered \u201c200 cuts of video clips\u201d, claiming […]<\/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-1309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allgemein"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1309","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=1309"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1310,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1309\/revisions\/1310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}