Mühlhausen (dpa/th) – The defense attorneys for the two accused in the trial of the attack on two journalists from Lower Saxony have demanded that their clients be acquitted of almost all charges. The younger defendant should only be sentenced to 200 hours of work for damage to property, his lawyer said on Wednesday in his plea before the Mühlhausen district court.
In essence, the defense attorneys repeated the version of the assault that the defendants had described at the beginning of the trial. After that, the journalists are said to have attacked the 23 and 28-year-old defendants and they only defended themselves.
Two journalists from Göttingen were seriously injured in the attack in April 2018 in the Fretterode region in northern Thuringia.
According to the conviction of the public prosecutor and the co-prosecutor, however, the two accused attacked the journalists – without having been attacked by them beforehand. Witnesses at the trial had testified to support this version of events. The public prosecutor’s office is demanding a youth sentence of one year and nine months for the younger of the two accused, suspended on probation. For the older of the two accused, the responsible public prosecutor pleaded for a prison sentence of three years and four months. Both defendants are assigned to the right-wing scene.
In their pleadings, the co-prosecutors did not make any specific demands for punishment for the accused, but instead stated that the court must be aware that its judgment in the case would have a major signaling effect on the importance of press freedom in Germany. After the defense’s pleadings, the co-prosecutor’s lawyers said the defendants’ representatives were trying to “deny, play down and operate a perpetrator-victim reversal.”
