Today Zsch\u00e4pe defense counsel Stahl gave his closing statement on Zsch\u00e4pe\u2019s criminal liability as a co-perpetrator of the murders, bombing attacks and robberies committed by the NSU. As announced by his colleague Heer last week, Stahl moved that Zsch\u00e4pe be acquitted of all these charges.<\/p>\n
Stahl began by announcing that the defense largely agreed with the prosecution as to which facts could be considered proven and only differed as to the legal characterization of these facts. In fact, however, his statement consisted of a mixture of attempts to attack the legal characterization of the facts as found by the prosecution \u2013 which, according to Stahl, did not establish Zsch\u00e4pe\u2019s liability as co-perpetrator \u2013 and attempts to attack these very facts and to defend Zsch\u00e4pe\u2019s self-presentation as someone who had only accompanied B\u00f6hnhardt and Mundlos underground more or less willingly and did not have anything to do with their crimes.<\/p>\n
As to the legal question whether the acts of which Zsch\u00e4pe stands accused \u2013 all of which, in our view, have been proven in court \u2013 suffice for a conviction as co-perpetrator, Stahl began with a quote from Prof. Claus Roxin, probably the most renowned expert on questions of the definition of (co-) perpetration under German criminal law. Stahl also referred to several decisions by the 3rd Chamber of the Federal Court of Justice, i.e. the very bench which will also have to decide on any defense appeals against the Munich judgment. Stahl concluded his statement with a quote from the presiding judge of that chamber which he meant to show that the Federal Court of Justice would not uphold a conviction of Zsch\u00e4pe as a co-perpetrator. However, a closer look at the Roxin quote already shows that Stahl considered these aspects in a rather one-sided manner: In an interview in the early days of the trial, Roxin had stated that living together with two murderers did not in itself make a person a murderer \u2013 but he had clearly made that statement based on at best a partial knowledge of the facts of the case and had also added that his view might be changed if additional factors were present (i.e. possible contact with the direct perpetrators during the actual commission of crimes). And as to the many decisions of the Federal Court of Justice to which Stahl referred, they considered cases where, e.g., the accused had driven her partner to a robbery on a gas station and waited outside in the car or where the accused had been a member of a group of fraudsters charged with ancillary tasks such as providing credit cards and wiring on monies gained fraudulently to the main perpetrators \u2013 cases which obviously do not have much in common with the case of the NSU.<\/p>\n
Now, Stahl\u2019s claims that a conviction for co-perpetration presupposes an influence on the commission of the actual crime, or at least the will to so influence the commission, is true at first approach. However, his attempts to prove, one by one, that the acts Zsch\u00e4pe is accused of do not fulfill this condition, and to pretend that this was all that needs to be said on the question, were based on an overly formal approach to the question which (intentionally or unintentionally) left out all of the political background. After all, Zsch\u00e4pe was not some random flat mate of two men who happened to be murderers. She had been active in neo-Nazi groups with the two men since the 1990s, groups in which documents such as the \u201cTurner Diaries\u201d were read, she had undergone a process of radicalization together with these men, had committed several crimes with them, had taken part in strategy discussions concerning armed struggle etc. What\u2019s more, the division of tasks between Zsch\u00e4pe and the two men, as described in the indictment and as proven in court, followed exactly along the lines laid down in blueprints such as the Turner Diaries. In short: the law cannot and should not deal with the NSU in the same way it deals with a couple robbing gas stations or with a gang of fraudsters. And contrary to Stahl\u2019s accusations against the federal prosecutions, to state this claim does not mean to argue for a separate \u201ccriminal law for enemies of the state\u201d. Rather the claim simply follows from the fact that an influence on the commission of crimes hinges on different criteria in cases of a small group committing crimes in furtherance of a political ideology in a strategic manner from the underground \u2013 a statement which, by the way, can also be found similarly in the books of criminal law expert Roxin.<\/p>\n
Parts of Stahl\u2019s statements were rather inane attempts at arguing against straw men. One clear example arose when he dealt with a bet in which Zsch\u00e4pe had offered a wager of \u201ccutting 200 video clips\u201d \u2013 which the prosecution rightly sees as a reference to cutting video clips for the NSU \u201cPink Panther\u201d video which Zsch\u00e4pe later sent out. Stahl felt compelled to deal in detail with the likelihoods that Zsch\u00e4pe had in fact lost that bet, that after losing it she had in fact honored her wager \u2013 as if the bet could only be relevant for the judgment if Zsch\u00e4pe had indeed cut these exact 200 clips exactly since she had lost this exact bet. This is, of course, nonsense as the relevance of the bet follows from a different consideration: it shows that, for Zsch\u00e4pe, the wager of \u201ccutting 200 video clips\u201d made as much sense and was as compatible with her daily life as the other wager, made in the same bet, of \u201ccleaning the living room ten times\u201d. This familiarity with the issue, together with other pieces of evidence, shows that Zsch\u00e4pe was deeply involved in documenting the crimes of the NSU and in producing propaganda based on these crimes \u2013 whether she in fact cut these very 200 clips is beside the point.<\/p>\n
As to the other acts of which Zsch\u00e4pe is accused, Stahl dealt with them in a similarly formalistic and unconvincing manner. Accordingly, his statement will not be of any help to his client, neither as concerns the judgment in Munich nor as concerns an appeal to the Federal Court of Justice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Closing statement of counsel Stahl on the question of co-perpetration Today Zsch\u00e4pe defense counsel Stahl gave his closing statement on Zsch\u00e4pe\u2019s criminal liability as a co-perpetrator of the murders, bombing attacks and robberies committed by the NSU. As announced by his colleague Heer last week, Stahl moved that Zsch\u00e4pe be acquitted of all these charges. […]<\/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-1616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allgemein"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1616","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=1616"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1617,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1616\/revisions\/1617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}