Police trial for Robert S.

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The police trial of Robert S. describes the case of the 18-year-old schoolboy Robert Syrokowski. On the morning of December 1, 2002, he was drunk and abandoned by two policemen on a country road. There he was run over a little later.

Sequence of events

On November 30th, 2002 Robert Syrokowski celebrated with friends in the disco "Ziegelei" in Groß Weeden. He left the bar alone, drunk and only lightly dressed. Later 1.99 per mille of alcohol were measured in his blood. He collapsed and passed out in the driveway to a landfill. Bystanders alerted the police, who sent an ambulance. When Robert Syrokowski came to, he refused to be driven to a hospital. The ambulance left him alone. Robert entered the B. couple's property and repeatedly rang the doorbell at their front door. He claimed to live in this house and wanted to be let in. It turned out that Robert and his family had moved within Lübeck on the same day.

The married couple Ulrike and André B. called the police. The police officers Alexander M. and Hans Joachim G. removed Robert Syrokowski from the property - allegedly to "sober up". In fact, however, they abandoned him at 4.33 a.m. on Kronsford Main Street, an uninhabited country road. This runs between Lübeck and Bliestorf in the Duchy of Lauenburg and is outside their area of ​​responsibility. Two kilometers from the place where Robert Syrokowski was left by the police, a VW Golf hit him at 5.30 a.m. He was immediately dead. The car was driven by the 22-year-old Johanna H., who, according to reports, had noticed Robert Syrokowski, who was crouching in the street, too late. It turns out that Robert was not wearing shoes or stockings at the time of the accident. He presumably had taken them off beforehand, at a temperature of three degrees Celsius.

Investigations

Investigations were initiated to find out whether the two patrolmen who abandoned Robert Syrokowski in the early morning hours of December 1st on the main street in Kronsford recognized the boy's helpless position and deliberately handed him over to this danger. The police said that Robert Syrokowski did not appear helpless. According to the information, they did not recognize the extent of his alcoholism. They would not have known anything about the previous police operation. They later stated that Robert Syrokowski had left the patrol car at his own request because it did not want to be driven home. What happened afterwards could not be reconstructed in the process. Ulrike and André B., the couple at whose front door Robert rang, testified that the accused police officers had not taken the boy seriously. That seemed strange to the couple. In addition, it could not be clarified why the two police officers could not have known about the emergency doctor's mission and thus about Robert's fall and his condition.

process

Initially, the case was rejected by both the Lübeck public prosecutor's office and the Schleswig public prosecutor's office. The reason given was that the Robert Syrokowski case was a fateful chain of unfortunate circumstances, so no one was responsible. Only after Robert's parents complained to the Higher Regional Court were charges brought. This was because of an open question as to why officers did not take Robert Syrokowski home or to a sobering cell. The Higher Regional Court saw sufficient suspicion. The investigations and, ultimately, the bringing of charges before the Lübeck Regional Court continued. The judges didn't believe Robert Syrokowski asked to get out of the police car halfway. What was certain was that the two police officers had not reported the trip to their operations center, as is required to document an operation. In the spring of 2007, over four years after Robert's death, the first trial took place.

The police officers Alexander M. and Hans Joachim G. were charged with suspending a helpless person resulting in death. Both the police officers' defense lawyers and the public prosecutor's office pleaded for acquittal. According to the prosecutor Marcel Ernst, although there was a suspicion, it could not be proven beyond doubt that the police officers recognized the boy's helpless situation. However, the two would have charged a "serious moral guilt" by leaving him to his own devices. And also because one of them said he would do the same again.

The case of negligent homicide against Johanna H., the driver of the car that killed Robert Syrokowski, was discontinued in January 2006. The defendant was silent about the accident. In the trial against the two police officers, she was supposed to testify - however, exactly 14 hours before the trial began, Johanna H. had a fatal accident in a traffic accident. The presiding judge Christian Singelmann spoke of a fateful link between the events.

Condemnation

In the first main hearing, the Lübeck judges sentenced the two police officers to a suspended sentence of nine months each for negligent homicide. The officials then went on appeal to obtain an acquittal. For this reason, Robert Syrokovski's parents also appealed. They justified this with the fact that the Lübeck Regional Court had not sentenced the police officers for suspension resulting in death. The minimum sentence for this sentence would have been three years in prison.

On January 10, 2008 the case went to the Third Criminal Senate of the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) and a public main hearing took place. Robert Syrokowski's parents were represented by the Hamburg audit specialist Johann Schwenn , while the defendants' lawyers were absent. Surprisingly, the Federal Prosecutor's Office changed its position and pleaded for the original Lübeck judgment to be upheld. They considered the prosecutors' and the accused's revision to be unfounded. In the end, the judgment was not upheld, but repealed and not sent back to Lübeck, but to Kiel. The Federal Court of Justice justified this decision by stating that the Lübeck Regional Court suspected “far-reaching legal concerns”, as the latter had denied the existence of a suspension resulting in death.

According to the Kiel district judges, at least the defendant Alexander M. recognized the helplessness of Robert Syrokowski. On September 17, 2008, the 46-year-old was sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment under file number 8 Ks 6/08 for suspending a helpless person resulting in death. The sentence was imposed by the district court in Kiel and suspended on probation. The verdict marked the end of his career as a police officer. The 59-year-old Hans-Joachim G., who was subordinate to him, was sentenced to nine months in prison, also on probation.

Legal position

In many suspension cases, the case law is based on the principles that were developed in the context of road traffic offenses. This is because the low number of indictments as well as convictions for suspension means that their case law itself has little development.

processing

Due to the great media popularity of the Robert Syrokowski case, the suspicion received increasing attention. This was accompanied by the discussion about the moral misconduct of the two police officers. The prosecutor Marcel Ernst had said at the trial that the accused had a "serious moral guilt" on themselves.

With the judgment of January 10, 2008, the lawyer Sönke Gerhold underpinned his argumentation for the tightening of police duties in the case of helpless people.

The court reporter Sabine Rückert wrote several times in the weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT about the Robert Syrokowski case. She also discussed the guilt of the two police officers with her colleague Andreas Sentker in an episode of the Zeit: Verbrechen podcast entitled "110 - Death When Called".

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Julia Jüttner: Police Officer Trial Robert S. - Exposed to Die Spiegel, May 30, 2007, accessed on January 31, 2020
  2. ↑ a b Sabine Rückert: 110 - Death when called. In: THE TIME. Crime, January 3, 2008, accessed February 2, 2020 .
  3. ↑ Sabine Rückert: Who is to blame for Robert's death? Two police officers, the Kiel district court ruled DIE ZEIT, September 25, 2008, accessed on January 31, 2020
  4. ↑ Julia Jüttner: "It was a completely normal mission for us" Spiegel, September 3, 2008, accessed on January 31, 2020
  5. ↑ a b Julia Jüttner: The guilty verdict that no one expected. In: Spiegel Panorama. Spiegel, May 31, 2007, accessed February 2, 2020 .
  6. ↑ Police officers convicted of the death of a high school student. Press office of the Federal Court of Justice, March 2, 2009, accessed on February 6, 2020 .
  7. ↑ a b c Sönke Gerhold “The creeping expansion of specific endangered offenses and the associated tightening of police duties for helpless people: Comment on BGH 3 StR 463/07 - judgment of January 10, 2008: suspension resulting in death by police officers; At the same time a contribution to the facts of the suspension. " New criminal policy, vol. 21, no. 2, 2009, pp. 69-79. JSTOR, accessed January 31, 2020
  8. ↑ E. John: Respect for self-determination and observance of the welfare: A moral-philosophical reflection on the justification of benevolent coercion. EthikJournal 2019, Issue 1, No. 5., accessed on January 31, 2020