Murder (austria)
In Austrian criminal law, murder is the basic offense of homicide .
Wording of the law
Section 75 of the Austrian Criminal Code (StGB) reads:
Anyone who kills someone else is punished with imprisonment from ten to twenty years or with life imprisonment.
Systematics
According to the Austrian Criminal Code, murder is the basic offense of willful death and the most serious offense of all. Other offenses of intentional homicide are punished more leniently ( § 76 to § 79 StGB). Since the Austrian Criminal Code does not contain any qualified facts of intentional homicide and, unlike in Germany or Switzerland, for example, no specific reprehensible motives such as B. lust for murder or treachery are necessary for the fulfillment of the offense, the range of punishment for murder is relatively large; This is intended to give the court the opportunity to impose a punishment appropriate to the guilt, the offense and the perpetrator, depending on the requirements of the individual case. The range of sentences is ten to twenty years or life imprisonment. It can be reduced to one year imprisonment by means of "extraordinary mitigation " ( § 41 StGB) if the mitigation reasons predominate. This broad possibility of judicial mitigation of sentences is a special feature of Austrian law.
According to Austrian law, murder is any willful killing. On the one hand, this results from the fact that Section 7 (1) of the Criminal Code states that, unless the law provides otherwise, only deliberate action is punishable. On the other hand, the requirement of intent in murder results from the existence of a separate offense for negligent homicide . According to the definition of intent in the StGB ( Section 5 (1) Sentence 2 StGB), the perpetrator must at least seriously consider it possible and accept the fact that his act (or, under other conditions, his failure to do so) leads to the death of a person ( conditional intent ).
Under Austrian law, murder can also be attempted as an intentional offense ( Section 15 StGB), as a successful offense, murder can be committed by omission ( Section 2 StGB), and participation ( Section 12 StGB) is also possible.
For adults, this offense can only be decided by jury procedure , for adolescents (14 to 18 years of age) - if they were under 16 years of age at the time of the commission - by lay judges. Thus in the first case eight - legally ignorant - jurors alone decide on the guilt of the perpetrator, in the case of a guilty verdict, they decide together with three professional judges on the sentence to be imposed. In lay judges' proceedings, a professional judge and two - legally ignorant - lay judges jointly decide on guilt and punishment. As in Germany, the murder is not subject to a statute of limitations. However, life imprisonment cannot be imposed after 20 years. They are replaced by a prison sentence of ten to 20 years ( Section 57 (1) StGB).
