Andreas M. sits slumped in the courtroom when the verdict is announced. After six days of negotiations, the first criminal chamber of the Munich I Regional Court, chaired by Judge Elisabeth Ehrl, ordered Andreas M. to be placed in a psychiatric facility.
In July last year, M. stabbed his roommate in an outpatient shared apartment at least 27 times with a kitchen knife – on the head, upper body and neck. He narrowly missed her carotid artery and vertebral artery. And if one of the police officers who arrived first had not immediately applied a pressure bandage to her arm, the woman could have bled to death.
It is clear to the court that M. committed the crime in a state of incapacity due to illness and cannot be punished for it. But the general public must be protected from him, as the judge explains. The public prosecutor also considers M. to be incompetent. For decades he has suffered from paranoid-hallucinatory schizophrenia, which began in the 1980s but was only recognized and treated with medication much later.
But whenever he stops taking his medication on his own initiative, he loses control of himself and no longer has any connection to reality and people. Doctors, experts, the social worker and the supervisor have sufficiently proven this. Judge Ehrl calls it a single ups and downs in M.’s life.
The court sees it as proven that the now 65-year-old trained electrician followed his roommate into her room that day for no reason and probably cut her forehead with a small pocket knife. She fled to the third roommate’s room. They then called the police together in the living room when M. suddenly came with the kitchen knife and started stabbing her roommate on the balcony. Finally he let go of her, put the knife in the cutlery drawer in the kitchen and opened the apartment door, where the police were already there.
Unlike the representative of the public prosecutor’s office in his first plea, the criminal chamber only assumes there was a conditional intention to kill. There is no reason or motive apparent.
M. has no memory of the crime, which the court accepts. After the attack, the roommate didn’t dare go out on the street alone for six months. She owes her life to the fact that most of the stings did not penetrate deeper into her body. She is still afraid.