VAbout a hundred supporters of the so-called lateral thinker movement demonstrated on Monday in front of the district court in Weinheim in Baden-Württemberg (Rhein-Neckar district). They were protesting the expected conviction of a 59-year-old doctor for issuing incorrect health certificates.
The doctor has positioned herself as a critic of the federal government’s pandemic policy for years and is said to have issued more than 4,000 false certificates to exempt patients from the mask requirement. In many cases, the doctor is said to have issued the certificates without having seen the patients or having had an anamnesis interview with them.
According to the legal opinion of the Federal Court of Justice (BGH), a certificate is already false if it is issued without a medical examination. According to the doctor, wearing masks is harmful to health and can also promote reinfection.
In their pleading, the public prosecutor’s office demanded a prison sentence of three and a half years and a three-year professional ban. In the main hearing, the doctor’s defense lawyer spoke of a “terror process” and a “totalitarian corona regime”.
The lawyer also represented – usually apparently unsuccessfully – critics of the corona measures in several proceedings before the Federal Constitutional Court and the Mannheim Administrative Court (VGH). It was not until mid-November that the district court in Passau sentenced a doctor to a one-year suspended prison sentence; the doctor had issued false mask certificates for students in 24 cases. In its judgment, however, the court refrained from issuing a temporary ban on the man’s activity.