In the trial of a triple murder in Starnberg, the verdict could come this Monday. The pleadings of the main defendant’s defense attorneys are scheduled for the morning. In the afternoon, the Munich II district court could then speak the verdict in the process after about a year and a half.
The public prosecutor’s office has demanded high juvenile sentences for murder for the two 21 and 22-year-old defendants. In her plea, she spoke out in favor of 13 years and six months in prison and the reservation of preventive detention.
Unusual request
The public prosecutor assumes that the main defendant, who is now 22 years old, shot his friend and his parents in January 2020. He is charged with three counts of murder. His 21-year-old roommate is said to have planned the murder of their friend and drove the main perpetrator to the scene. He’s on trial for murder.
The demand of the public prosecutor’s office is unusual in two respects: actually, in criminal law for young people, a maximum sentence of ten years also applies to murder. However, if adolescents – i.e. people between 18 and 21 years of age – are convicted under juvenile criminal law, up to 15 years are possible in rare cases of murder with a particularly serious degree of guilt.
And secondly, the prosecution is demanding the same sentence for the 22-year-old German, who admitted to having shot three people, and the 21-year-old Slovak, who is said to have helped plan the crime but was not present at the scene. According to the indictment, he drove his friend and roommate to the crime scene and picked him up again after the alleged murders. His defense attorneys have asked for an acquittal on the murder charge, admitting only involvement in the planning of an armed robbery.
Main accused confesses
He “neither planned the crime nor made any preparations for it,” it said in his defense attorney’s pleading last week on the murder charge. “A complicity is therefore excluded, even if the public prosecutor wishes it so much.”
The main defendant – in contrast to his co-defendant – confessed to the crimes during the trial and admitted that through the murders he also wanted to get the weapons that his buddy illegally owned in order to sell them. He also wanted to prevent a killing spree that his friend had planned in a shopping center.
The public prosecutor’s office did not doubt that these plans for the serious crime existed. However, this “doesn’t even begin to justify the act,” the prosecution said in its closing argument.
The crime from January 2020 also made headlines because the investigators were initially on the wrong track and assumed that the young man had shot his parents and then himself. But in the end, the police and prosecutors had to realize that everything was probably very different.