Goat hair case
The goat hair case is a case study in jurisprudence in which the necessary causality between the crime and the success of the crime is described. It is based on a judgment of the Reichsgericht dated April 23, 1929 (RGSt 63, 211).
facts
The defendant was an employee of a brush factory, in which he processed goat hair into brush bristles. He had goat hair imported from China through a trader and, contrary to the regulations, refrained from disinfecting it before processing. The goat hair contained anthrax , which then infected five factory workers, four of whom died.
The lay judge sentenced the defendant for negligent homicide and negligent bodily harm. The appellate court acquitted the accused, however, after an expert report confirmed that the disinfection methods available at the time would not have been expected to be completely sterile, i.e., to the judge's conviction, the workers would have been infected with the anthrax even after disinfection. Thus, the necessary causality between the act and the success of the act cannot be proven, the accused should be acquitted according to the principle in dubio pro reo . The revision of the public prosecutor's office was directed against this.
Summary of the judgment
The Reichsgericht overturned the appeals court's acquittal and referred the case back to the appeals court.
According to the opinion of the Reichsgericht, the appellate court had set too strict requirements for the affirmation of the causality between the act and the success of the act. In the view of the court, the cause of a successful act is any act or omission that presents itself as a condition of success that cannot be thought away without the success being lost. If there is evidence in individual cases that a damaging event occurred due to human behavior, the mere cause, which is difficult or impossible to calculate, which could have the same effect if the condition had not occurred, is not enough to determine the causality between To deny the act and the result of the act. Only if it were certain with certainty or with a probability bordering on certainty that the damaging event would have occurred even if the act or omission had not occurred, the causality between the success of the act and the act of act can be denied.
The decision of the appellate court does not do justice to this in that the mere possibility that the workers would have become infected with the anthrax pathogen even after disinfection has taken place is sufficient to deny the causality between the offense and the success of the offense. But even if this had been established with a probability bordering on certainty, the appellate court should have additionally examined whether this also applies to the death of the workers. In the opinion of the Reichsgericht, not every anthrax infection must necessarily lead to death, and in this case, too, a worker survived the infection. The Reichsgericht could therefore not rule out the possibility that disinfection, if not to completely prevent the infection, would at least have led to a milder course of the disease, which would then not necessarily have ended in death.
Effect of the judgment
Today, the judgment is - although it was originally about a different legal question - often used in law studies to answer the question of whether the failure to disinfect the goat hair is an active act or an omission . The prevailing opinion here, however, sees the defendant's act of handing the non-disinfected goat hair over to the worker as an active act of the defendant and thus a criminal liability for negligent bodily harm, respectively. Killing.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Christian Jäger, Exam-Repetitorium Criminal Law General Part . CF Müller Verlag, Heidelberg 2009, ISBN 3811497235 , p. 278