GERMANY: German criminal law entered uncharted territory yesterday after a self-confessed cannibal was found guilty of manslaughter but escaped a murder conviction for killing and eating a man three years ago, writes Derek Scally in Kassel:
A state court in Kassel said yesterday that Armin Meiwes (42), exhibited a "serious psychological perversion", but that his only obvious motive for the killing was cannibalism, not explicitly a crime under German law.
"This is not a classic case of cannibalism where someone is violently killed and eaten . . . the murder was highly unpleasant for him," said Judge Volker Mütze.
He called it a case of two mentally disturbed inhabitants of a "dark underworld" meeting accidentally on the Internet and agreeing to use each other as a means of satisfying their own sexual fantasies.
Meiwes, a well-spoken computer technician from Rotenburg near Frankfurt, gave only a brief flicker of reaction at the verdict and otherwise sat with a rigid expression, his hands folded before him throughout the following two-hour judgment. Dressed in a dark grey suit and grey tie, his wan face and hollow cheeks suggest he has lost weight since the trial began six weeks ago.
"We have opened a door on a world, a door we would rather immediately close again," said Judge Mütze.
"On the other hand it shows the danger of how people needing help are living out their fantasies in the grey zone of the Internet."
He said the unprecedented trial had brought into his courtroom "the kind of images I never imagined existed".
After the verdict Meiwes told Mr Harald Ermel, his defence attorney: "I'm relieved, at least I haven't been branded a murderer."
Meiwes denied murder and Mr Ermel had called for a five year sentence on a mercy killing charge.
The sentence handed down was closer to what he sought, said Mr Ermel, adding: "We won on points."
"Meiwes doesn't see himself as a murderer. He is no murderer", said Mr Ermel, but rather a "victim" of the Internet.
"Without the Internet it wouldn't have been possible for him to realise his fantasies. He wouldn't have had access to this material," he said.
Mr Ermel said Meiwes, expected to be released in 2008, has agreed to undergo therapy. "He wants to get away from his flesh fetish, but he will stay this way sexually forever."
Mr Marcus Köhler, the state prosecutor, had called for a murder conviction which in Germany carries a 15-year sentence.
He announced that he may launch an appeal, saying: "I still think he is guilty of murder."
Yesterday locals and journalists trudged through the snow to Kassel courthouse, past the Brothers Grimm Fairytale Museum, to hear the end of a grim fairytale of another kind.
The tale began three years ago when Meiwes placed an Internet advertisement looking for "well-built young men for slaughter". Bernd Brandes, a 43-year-old computer engineer from Berlin responded, saying he wanted to be dismembered, what the judge described as the "ultimate kick".
For Meiwes, Brandes was the chance to realise his childhood longing for a big brother which, during puberty, had become a sexual fantasy of consuming this imaginary big brother to remain close forever.
During the trial the court was shown shocking videos Meiwes made of the killing, which the judge called a kind of warped "wedding video". The tapes leave no doubt that Meiwes knew Brandes was still alive before killing him, a key prosecution claim for murder. But a second claim that Meiwes mutilated and killed Brandes for sexual gratification were clearly not the case from the videos, the judge said.
Neither did Meiwes kill for "base motives" but instead mechanically, "like a butcher", without any pleasure.
It was merely a means to the sexual arousal he sought from consuming human flesh. Brandes, on the other hand, was obsessed with being dismembered, what he said would be "the highest point of my life", and was uninterested what happened to him afterward. Brandes was "clearly irrational", but it was not clear whether or not he agreed to being killed, another obstacle to a murder conviction.
Meiwes was only caught in December 2002 after boasting of the killing on an Internet chat room, prompting an Austrian student to contact the police.
"When you think how many people were in these cannibal forums and that only one person contacted the police, it's shocking," said Judge Mütze, adding in a shaking voice that pictures and videos featuring cannibalism are "widely distributed" on the Internet. After two months on trial, Meiwes left the courtroom yesterday almost unnoticed by journalists who were already swarming around the lawyers in the hallway.
Surveying the courtroom briefly, he gave a meek smile, a quick flash of his teeth, and vanished.