A 54-Year-old blackmailer was sentenced this week to twelve and a half years in prison. He had poisoned baby food, and shops placed to extort a million total. The judgment was issued for attempted murder in coincidence with attempted extortion. It was spoken at the regional court of Ravensburg.
news from Germany the man is deliberately in a shopping centre include and plunder Sushi counter AFP
Who knows: Would have been the man in the neighboring district court of Kempten in the Allgäu before the court, would have been his punishment, maybe even harder. A little further to the West, in turn, the district court of Freiburg, he would perhaps, with less of it to come.
How hard a judgment in a criminal process is, depends also on where a defendant before the judge, as the scientist Volker Grundies in a study, the court has found the sanctions practice in Germany. The map below illustrates, how different, hard or mild, the verdicts in the German district court districts across all offence types compared to the Federal average, fail.
map: Regional differences in the sanctions hardness
For all offence types, in percent
explanation: the value of a district is above the average in Germany, for example, Frankfurt am Main, with 17.3 percent, will be imposed an average of more severe penalties than in the Rest of the Republic. These districts are colored in shades of gray. The value is lower, sitting there in the cutting of mild mannered judge. This is in the district of the regional court of Kiel, the case is about 18 percent below the national average. This country’s judicial districts have green shades.
in Total, are identified on the map with a marked geographical pattern. The judges in Northern Germany or Baden-Württemberg judge, therefore, Marsbahis in large Parts milder than those in the southern part of Bavaria. The hardness of the judgments is independent of the tort, stated in the study. Say: Where, for example, body injury more severe will be punished, even judicial decisions to other offences more stringent.
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The results support according to the Grundies, the assumption that there is in Germany vary from Region to Region growing “court cultures” Say: for various reasons, judges are basing their Judgments on their immediate colleagues and predecessors, to Decide. And because the German criminal law gives them a great degree of freedom in the determination of penalties that can be the results also in the case of similar offences, depending on the judicial district, so different.
In other countries, including the United States, there are, for example, so-called “Sentencing Guidelines”, guidelines for the sentencing determination. On the German Juristentag in Leipzig was discussed at the end of September about whether that could also serve here as a model. So it’s not “worth it in the future, with a view on the expected penalty” for a crime in the North instead of the South front of the court.
> the data:
<p data are taken from the study "Regional differences in the judicial sanctioning practice in the Federal Republic of Germany. An empirical analysis," and were provided to the star by Volker Grundies, author of the study, available on request. Grundies is a research fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for foreign and international criminal law. You can find more information here. He used for his study, data from the Federal Central register, in which about 1.5 million judgments from criminal proceedings from the years 2004, 2007 and 2010 were recorded. Serious offences were in the data set infrequently, the average penalty duration was 120 days. In the study, only the abstract duration of the penalty has flowed: In the case of money, the number of imposed daily rates and in the case of sentences of imprisonment sentences about their life, to take into account but without a suspension and probation.
“all offences” are various offence types in different weights. For example, forgery, homicide, theft, perjury, defamation, personal injury, power theft, Dangerous intervention in the traffic, rape, extortion or violations of the narcotics act.
The underlying data with the boundaries of the judicial districts were developed by the data team at the level and in the network as the template provided.
