In the case of Manfred Genditzki, who has been in prison for a good twelve years, the retrial has to be reassessed. One expert even thinks an accident is likely.
For the former caretaker Manfred Genditzki, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, a glimmer of hope is emerging. The Munich Higher Regional Court on Thursday at least partially granted Genditzki’s complaint and obliged the Munich I Regional Court to deal again with the request to reopen the proceedings. In December 2020, the 1st criminal chamber at the regional court had rejected Genditzki’s lawyer Regina Rick’s application for retrial as “inadmissible”.
Manfred Genditzki has been in prison for more than twelve years. In January 2012, the Munich II district court found him guilty of drowning 87-year-old Lieselotte Kortüm in her bathtub in Rottach-Egern in October 2008. The court had ruled out at the time that the pensioner fell into the bathtub and drowned as a result of a faint attack. It relied on the expertise of a Munich coroner who considered it impossible that the old woman had fallen into the position in which she was found.
Genditzki’s lawyer submitted the opinion of a professor of simulation technology in her application for re-admission, from which the exact opposite emerged: It is very possible and even probable that Lieselotte Kortüm had fallen and also had two bruises on her head. The District Court of Munich I had dismissed this report, however, with the remark that it was a matter of mere “probabilities”, not facts that could shake the judgment against Genditzki.
The OLG has now clearly opposed this assessment. The appraisal with the computer simulation was “admissible new evidence”, declared the higher regional judge, and thus partially overturned the decision of the regional court. However, the OLG itself did not decide whether to reopen the proceedings, but referred the decision to the Munich I Regional Court. The court was given the task of dealing in detail with the content of the report and also to hear the expert, Professor Syn Schmitt from Stuttgart. Only then, according to the OLG, can a decision be made on the merits of the reopening application. The same chamber that had previously rejected the request for reopening as inadmissible is responsible for this.
The Higher Regional Court rejected the application by lawyer Regine Rick to interrupt the execution of the life sentence for Manfred Genditzki. This is “not possible without the upcoming evaluation of the evidence”.