In the retrial before the Deggendorf district court, the 28-year-old accused was found guilty of murder. Presiding Judge Georg Meiski sentenced him to life imprisonment on Monday. At the end of October 2016, the man killed his ex-girlfriend and mother of his then one-and-a-half-year-old son in Freyung, Lower Bavaria, with numerous stab wounds.
In doing so, the criminal division partly followed the request of the public prosecutor and the joint prosecutor, who had pleaded for murder and for the determination of the particular gravity of the guilt. The defense attorneys assumed manslaughter and saw a 12-year prison sentence as appropriate. The reasoning for the verdict was still ongoing in the afternoon. The verdict is not yet legally binding.
In a first trial in 2017, the man was finally sentenced to twelve years in prison for manslaughter by the Passau district court. At that time, the charge was murder, but the judges could not prove beyond a doubt that the man stabbed his victim while he was already asleep – which would have meant the murder characteristic of malice. In 2019, two witnesses who had testified in favor of the accused in the first trial were convicted of making false statements. This made the retrial possible. Because: The Deggendorf judges did not rule out that their Passau colleagues would have pronounced a murder sentence in 2017 without the false statements.