EIt is the evening of January 13, 2022, when Corona demonstrators parade in front of the defendant's house in Frankfurt's Nordend. The forty-year-old, who had become a father a year earlier, was just putting his child to bed, as he later told the court. He is a dialysis patient and immunocompromised and has to go to the hospital every other day. During the hours he spends there, he tries to protect himself from the virus by wearing a mask. He can't do much with the behavior of the people on his doorstep. “I had little understanding of this environment in which the criticism was being made,” he said when asked by the judge about his attitude towards the demonstrators.
As he describes the situation, he stands at the window for about half a minute on that evening, when it is already dark, and looks outside. What he sees makes him angry. So he opens the window and calls out. Meaning: “Fuck off.”
What he doesn't do: Throw a raw egg at the demonstrators – he says. That's exactly what the public prosecutor's office is accusing him of. And not only that. She considers the raw egg to be a dangerous tool within the meaning of the criminal code, so she has charged him with attempted grievous bodily harm. To qualify as a dangerous tool, an object must be capable of causing significant injury due to its nature and specific use. Does this apply to a raw egg that is thrown from the second floor of a residential building at a demonstration?
Egg just burst on the floor
The public prosecutor's office is apparently not really convinced by its own accusation. Even before the main hearing began, the responsible department head made the proposal to stop the proceedings in return for the payment of a fine. The defendant refused: “Because it wasn’t him,” his defense attorney said in court.
Whoever threw the egg: no one will be hit on January 13, 2022. The police are not aware of any injuries or injuries, only an egg bursting on the ground is documented. The two police officers who appear in the investigation file and who the court can therefore question as witnesses neither saw the throw nor the thrower; even two years after the crime, they can no longer remember whether there was just one egg or several on the ground lay. Both simply report hearing about an egg being thrown over the radio. When they arrived at the house, they saw colleagues – no one remembers who they were – using lamps to illuminate a window, behind which the two witnesses thought they remembered an angry man with an “oval face”, short hair and a beard .
The court can no longer understand whether he is actually the egg thrower and whether the man seen is the defendant. This means that the defense attorney neither has to submit his prepared application for evidence regarding “test throws” nor does the question of whether the raw egg can really be considered a dangerous tool be discussed. “As a rule, there needs to be a specific injured party in the case of bodily harm,” says the public prosecutor, who stepped in at short notice for the trial. “I wouldn’t shy away from hiring without conditions.”
The judge also thinks that is reasonable. He discontinues the proceedings without conditions due to low levels of guilt and because there is no public interest in prosecution. The former defendant no longer has to worry about a possible criminal record, but can return to his current main job: being a father.
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