Masks in the pandemic: Few loved them, but most wore them anyway. Some saw the mask requirement as harassment and castigated it as a health hazard. False medical certificates that exempt from the obligation to wear a mask are once again occupying the judiciary.
Landsberg am Lech (dpa/lby) – A group of supporters came and filled the courtroom, as is often the case in such processes: On Wednesday, proceedings began in front of the Landsberg district court against a 60-year-old doctor from Kaufering for allegedly false mask exemptions during the Corona Pandemic. Also accused are two women who are said to have helped him with the exhibition. Silence in the dock: All three did not comment on the allegations at the start of the process.
The new negotiation dates have been discussed for a long time in the morning. The process is interrupted and ultimately the judge stays the proceedings. No appointment was found. The process is scheduled to restart in June. The process has been postponed several times.
The public prosecutor accuses the accused of 117 cases of incorrectly issued certificates. They are said to have been issued between May 2020 and January 2021 without the doctor examining the recipients. Altogether there should have been more than 4700 certificates. According to the indictment, 17 euros were charged for the certificate.
In video recordings that were played in court in the morning before the proceedings were suspended, the doctor is said to have admitted that he sometimes issued certificates even if he did not know patients. Whether this is usable, however, remained open.
Since the doctor had pointed out the possibility of mask exemption for medical reasons on his homepage, he was soon no longer able to personally process all inquiries, some of which were received from all over Germany, said the public prosecutor. Therefore, according to him, the 54 and 45-year-old women who were also accused helped to fill out the blank certificates and send them to the recipients.
Such certificates were particularly popular with critics of the Corona measures. Even if measures no longer apply to a large extent: the opinion of some opponents has not changed – this becomes clear with the supporters of the accused in front of the courtroom.
The accused, as a determined critic of the Corona policy, also appeared regularly at demonstrations and rejected the obligation to wear a mask, the prosecutor continued in his indictment. Once he compared wearing a mask with the Hitler salute, says the prosecutor. The doctor’s lawyer emphasized that his client had been acquitted here. However, the judgment is not yet final.
Among other things, blank certificates were secured during a search at the doctor’s, which the judge listed as evidence in the process. According to the prosecutor, only the name, address and date of birth of the recipient had to be entered – and a “fictitious diagnosis”, as the prosecutor said.
A temporary professional ban was issued against the 60-year-old during the investigation. The Augsburg Regional Court then decided that the doctor was only no longer allowed to issue mask certificates, but could otherwise pursue his profession.
There have already been several lawsuits against doctors for issuing incorrect health certificates, according to the criminal accusation. The corresponding paragraph 278 of the Criminal Code was expanded in the course of the pandemic and now also mentions vaccination certificates or test certificates. In particularly serious cases, the accused can be sentenced to up to five years in prison, for example if they acted in a gang or commercially.
In one of the largest lawsuits about false mask certificates, a doctor was sentenced to two years and nine months in prison in Weinheim in January, and more than 4,000 cases were involved. In addition, the local district court imposed a provisional professional ban. She, too, is said to have certified the exemption from the mask requirement without seeing those affected, let alone examining them.
The trial in Weinheim near Mannheim was accompanied by protests from supporters – similar to a trial last August before the district court in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. There, a doctor was sentenced to two years in prison and three years of professional ban. According to the verdict, she had issued false certificates 309 times – sometimes even when she was already under investigation.
In November, the district court of Passau, in the second instance, sentenced a doctor from Lower Bavaria to a one-year suspended sentence and a fine of 50,000 euros for false mask certificates. In the case, 79 cases were charged, leaving 24.
