Domestic tyranny

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As a domestic tyrant murder is the killing of an abusive spouse , referred in particular after an argument. This is mostly a form of killing which, according to German law, constitutes murder ; Usually situations are exploited in which the physically superior spouse is innocent and defenseless ( treacherous murder ).

German law

The "house tyrant case" of the BGH (facts)

The tyrant case of BGH counts in the law as one of the most well-known case studies .

According to the findings of the trial court , the defendant was repeatedly the victim of severe physical abuse and humiliation by her husband over a long period of time . Over time, the violence turned increasingly against their daughters. The defendant's husband, who would later become the victim of the crime, had threatened her that he would find her, even if she were to be taken to a women's shelter or similar before him. escape. Therefore, separation from her husband was not an option for the accused. In the defendant, therefore, the decision matured that the only way out was to kill the husband.

When she happened to find the husband's revolver one morning while cleaning up, she put the decision into action and shot the sleeping husband.

Legal evaluation

According to German law, even after years of abuse, the act is not justified by self-defense within the meaning of Section 32 of the Criminal Code (StGB) . There is a lack of the presence of an attack. According to the prevailing opinion, a justifying state of emergency according to § 34 StGB fails because the legal good life is not accessible to a weighing up. An apology according to Section 35 of the Criminal Code is often refused on the grounds that the act could be averted differently within the meaning of this provision, for example by taking state aid.

The problem in domestic tyrant cases is the compatibility of the mandatory life sentence under Section 211 I of the Criminal Code with the principle of guilt . For this reason, jurisprudence tries to impose an appropriate, milder sentence in accordance with Section 49 I No. 1 of the Criminal Code at the level of sentencing , which does justice to the abuse that has often occurred for years . Lawyers call this the legal consequence solution .

Treatment in common law

In the area of ​​application of common law , the background of domestic tyrant murders is increasingly no longer only taken into account in the sentencing, but is already modifying the interpretation of the requirements for the offense. Based on sociological findings such as Lenore Walker's cycle of violence , the explanatory patterns of the behavior of (mostly female) persons were taken into account in the case law, so that a self-defense situation was assumed even in the case of a sleeping "domestic tyrant" and, accordingly, punishment mitigations or acquittals were assumed came.

Comparative law study

In a study by the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg and the Freiburg Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law , the case law in eight European countries was compared between 1997 and 2005 . The aim of the study was to find out to what extent criminal law is harmonized in Europe and how the individual countries deal with the same case. Four variants of domestic tyrant murder were chosen as a case study, as the problem was known to all the judges, prosecutors, lawyers and criminal lawyers questioned and judges can use a certain amount of discretion depending on the case. The outcome of the judgments tended to be the same in most EU countries. However, they differed in terms of punishment, which among other things depended on whether the judgments were made by jury courts or professional judges. Germany and Austria were in the middle.

literature

  • Hillenkamp , In tyrannos - victimodogmatic remarks on the killing of the family tyrant , in: Festschrift für Miyazawa, 1995, pp. 141 ff.
  • Lenore E. Walker, The Battered Woman Syndrome, 1984
  • Wanja Andreas Welke, The “domestic tyrant murder” in the German criminal offense system, in Zeitschrift für Rechtssppolitik , February 2004, issue 1, p. 15
  • Helmut Gropengießer: The domestic tyrant murder: an investigation into the legal treatment of homicide in normative and factual terms. Berlin, 2008 (series of criminal law research reports) ISBN 978-3-86113-857-0

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c BGH, judgment of the 1st criminal senate v. March 25, 2003, Az .: 1 StR 483/02, NStZ 2003, 482
  2. ↑ Fischer, Criminal Code , 61st edition 2014, § 211 Rn. 45
  3. ↑ Welke, ZRP 2004, 15 (17)
  4. ↑ Walker, The Battered Woman Syndrome , 1984, pp. 95f
  5. ↑ Welke, ZRP 2004, 15 (17) with further references
  6. ↑ a b The tyrant murder , Freiburg lawyers complete international pioneering study , Freiburg University Magazine 2005, ISSN  0947-1251 , p. 30
  7. ↑ Die ZEIT: The Death of the Domestic Tyrant, May 4, 2005

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