Sirius case
The Sirius case is a famous case study from German criminal law . It goes back to a judgment of the Federal Court of Justice of July 5, 1983. It focuses on the definition of criminal is killing in indirect perpetration and criminal-free participation at suicide .
facts
The BGH describes the facts in its judgment as follows: In 1973 or 1974 the defendant met H. , born in 1951, in a discotheque , who was "at that time still an employed and complex young woman". She developed an intense friendship with the defendant, who was four years her senior, in which sexual contact was insignificant. The main subject of the relationship was discussions of psychology and philosophy , which were carried out in meetings every few months and in more frequent telephone calls, sometimes lasting several hours. In the course of time the accused became H.'s teacher and advisor in all matters of life. He was always there for her. She trusted and believed him blindly.
In the course of their numerous philosophical conversations, the defendant let the woman know that he was a resident of the star Sirius . The Sirians are a race that is philosophically on a much higher level than humans. He was sent to earth with the task of ensuring that some valuable people, including H. , could continue to live with their souls on another planet or on Sirius after the complete disintegration of their bodies. In order for her to achieve her goal, however, H. needs an intellectual and philosophical development. When the defendant realized that the woman had full faith in him, he decided to use this trust to enrich himself at her own expense. He explained to H. that she could acquire the ability to continue to live on another heavenly body after her death by putting the monk Uliko , whom he knew, into total meditation for some time . This makes it possible for your body to go through several levels while sleeping and to go through a spiritual development. For this, however, 30,000 DM would have to be paid to the monastery in which the monk lived . H. believed the defendant. Since she did not have enough money, she obtained the required amount through a bank loan. The defendant used the money for himself. As often as H. in the following months by the efforts of Uliko inquired, she comforted the accused. He later explained to her that the monk had put himself in great danger in his experiments, but had not achieved any success, because her consciousness was building a strong barrier against spiritual development. The reason for this lies in the body of the H .; the blockade can only be removed by destroying the old body and acquiring a new one.
When the defendant noticed that the woman was still completely convinced of the correctness of his statements, he made a plan to derive further financial benefit from her trust. The accused pretended to have a new body ready for her in a red room on Lake Geneva , in which she would find herself as an artist when she parted with her old body. However, she also needs money in her new life. It can be obtained by taking out a life insurance policy for 250,000 DM (500,000 DM in the event of accidental death), irrevocably appointing him as the beneficiary and parting with her current life through a simulated accident. After the payment, he will bring her the sum insured. The woman took out an insurance contract based on the defendant's proposals. Insurance coverage began on December 1, 1979. The monthly insurance premium amounted to DM 587.50. H. handed the defendant DM 4,000 in cash because, as he told her, after waking up on Lake Geneva, she had given her the money will be delivered immediately as start-up capital is needed. The payment of the sum insured could be delayed.
According to an initial plan of the defendant, the woman was supposed to end her current life by a fake car accident , according to a later plan by sitting in a bathtub and dropping a switched-on hairdryer into the bath water. At the request and according to the instructions of the defendant, the woman tried to implement this plan in her apartment on January 1, 1980, after having previously done some things, following a suggestion by the defendant, which should indicate that she was in the middle of it unintentionally life was torn. The fatal electric shock did not occur, however. For "technical reasons", H. only felt a tingling sensation on her body when she dipped in the hairdryer. The defendant, who was in another city, was surprised when H. answered his control call. For about three hours, in about ten phone calls, he gave her instructions on how to proceed with the attempt to divorce. Then he refrained from further efforts because he considered them futile.
The woman acted in complete reliance on the defendant's statements. She dropped the hair dryer in the water hoping that she would immediately wake up in a new body. The thought of a real suicide that would end her life forever did not occur to her. She refused to commit suicide. Man has no right to do so. The accused was aware that the behavior of bondage to him H. was determined entirely by his pretensions and instructions.
The district court has sentenced the accused to a total imprisonment of seven years for attempted murder , fraud and for deliberate bodily harm in unauthorized use of academic degrees and an offense against the Heilpraktikergesetz . The appeal before the Federal Court of Justice was unsuccessful.
Reasons for decision
The main question of the case is whether it is merely inciting and aiding and abetting (attempted) suicide, which is not punishable under German law, or whether the defendant tried to have someone else commit murder and thereby become an indirect perpetrator ( Section 25 subs . 1, 2nd alternative StGB ).
The accused had not tried to convince H. to step out of life in order to enter a transcendent existence through the “gate of death”. Instead, he made her believe that she could continue her life in another body. He evoked in her an error about the non-occurrence of death and with the help of this error consciously and deliberately triggered the event that was to lead to her death. Thus, in the opinion of the BGH, he was the perpetrator of an attempted homicidal offense by virtue of superior knowledge, through which he guided the erring and turned them into a tool against himself. The fact that the suggestions to which the woman succumbed were completely unbelievable did nothing to change that.
The case is also known because the conviction for fraud decided to what extent gullible people are protected by Section 263 of the Criminal Code; the protection of the regulation is independent of the recognizability of the alleged fact as a lie by a sensible person. A person accused of fraud cannot try to prevent the establishment of the objective facts by showing the untrue factual assertion as an obvious untruth.
Individual evidence
- ↑ BGH, judgment of July 5, 1983 , Az. 1 StR 168/83, full text = BGHSt 32, 38.
- ↑ Wessels / Beulke , Criminal Law General Part, 40th edition, Rn. 539
See also
Web links
literature
- Ernst Reuss : murder? Homicide? Or what? Bizarre from Germany's criminal courts. P. 10 ff. Erma, Berlin 2017. ISBN 978-1-5480-1429-2 .
- Ernst Reuss : Sirius, Katzenkönig and Co. Five cases from the history of criminal law. erma, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-1-5472-6548-0 .
- Claus Roxin : Annotation. In: NStZ 1984, 70,
- Sippel: Judgment note. In: NStZ 1984, 357.
- Eberhard Schmidhäuser: Note on judgment. In: JZ 1984, 195.
- Neumann: Discussion of the verdict. In: JuS 1985, 677.
- Dieter Meurer: Dogmatics and pragmatism - milestones in the case law of the BGH in criminal matters. In: NJW 2000, 2936.
- Michael Kubiciel: Criminal liability of the initiator of an attempted suicide - The Sirius case. In: JA 2007, 729.
