Fornits
General Interest => Open Free for All => Topic started by: Anonymous on January 11, 2006, 09:11:00 AM
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German cannibal faces murder charge again at trial
Jan 11, 2005
By Philip Blenkinsop
BERLIN (Reuters) - A German man who killed and ate a willing victim faces the prospect of a stiffer sentence at a retrial starting on Thursday for a crime that continues to horrify and enthral.
Armin Meiwes, 44, was convicted of manslaughter and given an 8-1/2-year jail term in January 2004 for cutting up a man he met via the Internet three years before.
However, Germany's Supreme Court ruled last April that the verdict was too lenient and Meiwes should face a second trial with a renewed murder charge.
Retrial chambers do not have to follow a higher court's decision, but are normally steered by their arguments. However, as prosecutors point out, this case is anything but normal.
Meiwes, a computer repairman, admitted killing Berlin-based computer specialist Bernd-Juergen Brandes, 42, but had initially been spared a murder conviction and a possible life sentence because the victim had asked to be eaten.
Prosecutors argued that Meiwes should have been found guilty of murder as he had killed to satisfy perverted desires.
Defense counsel Harald Ermel has argued that Meiwes's sole motive was to meet the wishes of his victim and that his crime was only "killing on request," a form of illegal euthanasia that carries a maximum five-year sentence.
Ermel declined to comment on the case before Thursday's trial, although he said on Monday he would seek to block the planned March screening of "Rotenburg," a film based on Meiwes's life and named after his home town in central Germany.
At his home there, in a "slaughter room" fitted out with butcher's bench, meat hook and cage, Meiwes severed Brandt's penis and they both tried to eat it.
Later he killed Brandt, by then unconscious from blood loss, cut his body up and froze it, eating some 20 kg (44 lb) of it over the following months.
Psychiatrists found Meiwes deeply disturbed but sane.
The Frankfurt court must examine Meiwes's motives and ask if they were sufficient to constitute murder. The higher court said the original court had ignored the fact that Meiwes had filmed the slaying for sexual gratification.
But there are some questions the trial, scheduled to last until March, will never answer in this bizarre case of sexual fetishism, such as what sort of person would want to be eaten.
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German cannibal jailed for life after retrial
By Philippe Naughton and agencies
A German cannibal who admitted killing and eating a man he met over the internet was convicted of murder and sentence to life in prison today after a retrial that has kept Germany engrossed.
Armin Meiwes, a 44-year-old computer technician, was originally convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to eight years' jail over the killing in March 2001 of Bernd Juergen Brandes.
But that verdict was overturned by an appeals court to allow prosecutors to seek a tougher sentence.
In the retrial, which started in January, Meiwes's lawyers argued that the Frankfurt state court should instead convict him of the lesser offence of "killing on demand" - which carries a maximum sentence of five years - on the grounds that he was only following his victim?s wishes.
Instead, Meiwes was found guilty both of murder and of "disturbing the peace of the dead".
Meiwes met Brandes, 43, from Berlin, after advertising on the web for a young man for "slaughter and consumption" and invited him to his farmhouse in the town of Roteburg.
The two men had sex before Meiwes severed his victim's penis, which they then fried and tried to eat. He later stabbed his bleeding, unconscious victim in the throat and cut away other parts of his body.
Meiwes admitted that he eventually ate some 20kg of Brandes?s flesh, accompanied by potatoes and a pepper or wine sauce, served on "good crockery".
But he testified that Brandes had wanted to die and had asked to be stabbed after drinking a bottle of cold medicine to lose consciousness. "Otherwise, I would never have done it," he said.
Legal arguments in the case have revolved around whether this was murder or the lesser crime of "killing on demand".
But what fascinated both the German press and public was the testimony in which Meiwes revealed his obsessions and lifted the lid on an underworld of cannibalism which Meiwes claims counts about 800 members in Germany.
Meiwes has told the court that he now regretted killing Brandes and has apologised to his victim?s boyfriend. But he has remained unrepentant about eating his flesh, saying it was the "ultimate kick" both of them were seeking.
Psychologists told the court that Meiwes was a mentally sane, if lonely, man who held down a steady job. Meiwes himself has said his cannibal fantasies began in his childhood, when his father abandoned his family, and he dreamt of eating one of his school friends so that somebody would stay with him forever.
He has also said that from his prison cell he still fantasises about killing people when he saw attractive young bodies on television or in magazines.
"I find this extremely worrying," state prosecutor Annette von Schmiedeberg told the court last week. He videotaped his meeting with Brandes, in what prosecutors said was a bid to make sure he could watch it again later to satisfy his fantasies.
The case inspired a US-made horror film Butterfly, A Grimm Love Story, which Meiwes succeeded in blocking on privacy grounds.
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http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0448400/ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0448400/)