Sliding date
When sliding date in German criminal is a quick trial date mainly serves to continue the trial within the period of the designated, § 229 Code of Criminal Procedure (CCP) to ensure. The name comes from the fact that the latest possible date for a continuation of the main hearing is postponed by means of the shift date .
Section 229 of the Code of Criminal Procedure stipulates that the main hearing may be interrupted for up to three weeks (Paragraph 1). Pursuant to Section 229 (2) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the main hearing may be interrupted for up to one month if the hearing took place on at least ten days beforehand. In practice, however, it is not uncommon that, in the event of unforeseen interruptions, no hearing can be found within this period on which all those involved in the proceedings are available for another day of the main hearing. If the main hearing were not continued on the day after the end of the interruption period at the latest, it would have to start all over again ( Section 229, Paragraph 4, Sentence 1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure); To prevent this, a postponement can be set, which should often only last a few minutes, for example to read out a document of evidence. This formally complies with the regulation of Section 229 (1) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, and a further interruption of up to three weeks can then take place before the main hearing continues. According to the case law of the Federal Court of Justice , however, the content of the proceedings must be promoted in response to the final verdict, even if the appointment is postponed. So-called mere postponement appointments are not sufficient, which only formally comply with the interruption period, but in which no process actions or discussions on factual or procedural issues are actually carried out or in which uniform procedural processes are arbitrarily broken up into several short procedural sections and these are distributed over several negotiation days. In the case of such a purely postponement date, there may be a reason for revision .
The practical importance of this procedure was considerably greater in the period before September 1, 2004, because according to the legal situation at the time in Section 229 (1) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, only an interruption of up to ten days was provided instead of up to three weeks as is now the case.
