Funder process
The Pfunderer trial was a criminal trial before the Bozen jury that began on July 8, 1957 and initially ended with the court judgment in the 1st instance on July 16 of the same year, in which seven of the eight young men from Pfunders accused of murder - afterwards also known in the press as the Pfunderer Buibm or as the Pfunderer Buam - were found guilty and sentenced to long prison terms. For the majority of the accused, the verdict of the first appellate instance before the Court of Appeal in Trento on March 7, 1958 resulted in a tightening of the sentence, which was withdrawn in the last appeal before the Court of Cassation in Rome on January 16, 1960.
On the night of August 15 to 16, 1956, the small workers' canteen in the Letterhäusl in Pfunders was the scene of a tussle between a group of young men from the village and two Italian officials from a finance watch stationed in Pfunders . The trigger was the behavior of the two officers to reach the curfew had mitgezecht with the boys, then turned out the officer and einforderten compliance with the curfew. The boys defied the tax officials' orders and took physical action against them. The two Italians fled. One of the two, Raimondo Falqui from Sardinia , was overtaken and beaten by the farm boys. When he was already on the ground, they kicked him hard. The next morning the body of Falquis was found under a short bridge in the Roanerbach stream.
All fourteen boys who had been in the pub that night were arrested. Around eight o'clock, murder charges were brought. The trial received a lot of international attention because, in the opinion of the defense, the penalties imposed were disproportionately high. The defense had asserted that the body had been removed from the scene of the crime without any traces being secured beforehand or any recordings being made of the location of the body. The community doctor Dr. Kofler, who was the first to examine and autopsy the body, was not heard by the public prosecutor or by the court as a witness or medical expert. The autopsy results of the coroner Prof. Franchini, who found 1.7 per thousand alcohol in the blood of the deceased and, in addition to minor other injuries to Falqui's body, a fatal head wound, which presumably resulted from a fall into the stream bed, were not taken into account in the judgment. A woman who could testify to the location of the body in the streambed was not admitted by the court to testify, although the defense had requested it. The defendants had made statements in their dialect that did not correspond to the Italian translation and therefore had a very negative effect on them in many respects. The use of a sworn interpreter was refused by the chairman of the court.
On July 11, 1960, Austria lodged a complaint with the European Commission on Human Rights regarding the judgment , which on January 11, 1961 was partially declared admissible.
literature
- Rolf Steininger: South Tyrol between diplomacy and terror 1947–1969. Presentation in three volumes (publications of the South Tyrolean Provincial Archives / Pubblicazioni dell'Archivio della Provinicia di Bolzano 6-8) , Athesia, Bozen 1999, Volume 1: 1947–1959
Individual evidence
- ^ Politics in the courtroom . In: Die Zeit , No. 16/1958
- ^ Rolf Steininger: South Tyrol between diplomacy and terror 1947-1969. Presentation in three volumes (publications of the South Tyrolean Provincial Archives / Pubblicazioni dell'Archivio della Provinicia di Bolzano 6-8) , Athesia, Bozen 1999, Volume 1: 1947–1959, The “Pfunderer Process”, p. 325 ff.