Dhe district court in Bochum has to make a new decision on the preventive detention of a sex offender who has been sentenced to a total of nine years in prison. The Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe (BGH) reversed a corresponding judgment of the regional court of September 2, 2021, insofar as it relates to the placement of the then 46-year-old German that was ordered at the time.
The case had caused a nationwide sensation. The Bochum district court had convicted the man of sexual abuse and other serious crimes in more than 400 cases and ordered subsequent preventive detention. The convict had held an underage boy in his Recklinghausen apartment for two and a half years and sexually abused him. The then 13-year-old suddenly disappeared from an assisted living facility for young people in mid-2017 and was accidentally discovered by the police when officers searched the accused’s apartment shortly before Christmas 2019.
District court must renegotiate
The 4th Criminal Division of the BGH overturned the Bochum judgment regarding preventive detention in the appeal proceedings with the decision of August 31, 2022 and returned the proceedings to another criminal division of the regional court. The order for the placement in preventive detention does not stand up to “revision law review”, according to a statement by the Federal Court of Justice on Wednesday. Therefore, the decision must be renegotiated and decided.
At that time, the Bochum Criminal Court, both in justifying a tendency to commit dangerous crimes and in developing the danger prognosis for the accused, based it on the fact that his testimony contained a significant shift in responsibility with blame being assigned to the joint plaintiff and the reversal of the roles of perpetrator and victim. Permissible defensive behavior may not be used “neither as a reason for the danger nor as a point of reference for the dangerousness of the accused,” the BGH judged. Otherwise the defendant would have been forced to abandon his defense strategy in order to counteract a decision on preventive detention that was unfavorable to him.
If the accused in his defense denies, trivializes or blames someone else for the crimes he is accused of, “this is fundamentally permissible”. The limit of a permissible defense strategy is only reached “when denying, playing down or incriminating the victim or a third party is an expression of a particularly reprehensible attitude”. But that is not the case here.
