Judgment in Lübeck
Child abused while sleepwalking: Court convicts leading public prosecutor of rape
The defendant (front) next to his lawyers before the start of the trial for serious sexual abuse of a child in the Lübeck regional court
© Marcus Brandt / DPA
In the trial of a man who is said to have abused his own child while sleepwalking, the judges made a verdict: There could be no question of sleepwalking. The defendant must now serve a suspended sentence.
In a trial involving child sexual abuse by an allegedly sleepwalking former public prosecutor, the Lübeck regional court convicted the accused, among other things Rape sentenced to a suspended sentence of one and a half years. According to a court spokesman, the responsible chamber considered it proven on Wednesday that the 52-year-old had abused his own son at night in 2019. She didn’t assume she was sleepwalking.
The accused did not comment on the allegations during the trial that began around two weeks ago in the Schleswig-Holstein city. During the previous investigation, however, he had stated that he had committed the crime as a sleepwalker and therefore in a state of incapacity. Clarifying the question therefore took up a lot of space in the proceedings.
In the end, the court was not convinced by the argument of alleged sleepwalking. According to the spokesman, the chamber referred, among other things, to the sequence of events, which should be understood as a kind of multi-stage event with interaction and reaction. In addition, there were no reports of comparable sleepwalking incidents from the defendant’s personal environment.
Judges reduce sentences
The verdict, which was not yet final, differed fundamentally from the pleas of the public prosecutor’s office and the defense, which had called for an acquittal. Only the co-prosecution, who represented the man’s son, spoke out in favor of a conviction in the criminal proceedings.
According to the spokesman, the court took into account in favor of the accused that the incident in March 2019 was an isolated, one-off act. There were no further incidents before or after. An unconstitutional procedural length of two and a half years, for which the defendant was not responsible, also had a mitigating effect on the sentence. Four months of the sentence are therefore considered to have already been served.
The case had a long history. The investigations against the accused, who previously worked for the Lübeck public prosecutor’s office, were conducted by the Kiel public prosecutor’s office, which, however, like the Schleswig-Holstein public prosecutor’s office later, initially refrained from filing charges. However, the Schleswig-Holstein Higher Regional Court in Schleswig assumed that there was sufficient suspicion of the crime as part of a lawsuit enforcement procedure, which is why the trial took place.
According to previous information from the public prosecutor’s office, the accused turned himself in in 2019 after he wanted to find out about his crime from family members. According to his own statements, he was sleepwalking at the time of the crime and had no memory. According to media reports, the defendant’s wife and mother of the child later filed for divorce. There was a separation.