KMore than half an hour after the main hearing in the Mouhamed Dramé case reopened, one of the defense lawyers asked on Wednesday morning to be allowed to make a trial statement. The lawyer's aim is to ensure that everyone involved in the trial, including journalists, perceives what is, from the defense's point of view, an important relief victory. The young social worker's statement “impressively confirmed that witness evidence is the most uncertain evidence in the criminal process,” says the lawyer.
While this witness remembered that Dramé approached the police officers very slowly and rather disorientedly, another social worker remembered the exact opposite on an earlier day of the trial. In fact, the man said that Dramé came out from behind a wall and ran towards the officers. “No valid conclusions are possible on this basis,” says the defense attorney.
Since shortly before Christmas, five police officers have had to answer before the Dortmund regional court for the death of the 16-year-old Senegalese Mouhamed Dramé during an operation on the premises of a youth welfare facility.
The boy was cowering apathetically in a niche
Their leader called the emergency number on August 8, 2022 because he saw no other way to stop Dramé from harming himself. The boy had been crouching apathetically in a niche for some time, holding a kitchen knife to his stomach. First, two plainclothes officers arrived, and shortly afterwards patrol officers arrived at the youth welfare facility. But instead of protecting the boy from himself, the operation quickly got out of hand.
Apparently intending to persuade the apathetic boy to drop the knife, the 55-year-old service group leader ordered the use of pepper spray. But Dramé kept it in his hand as he stood up and moved toward the officers. Two police officers tried to stop him with Tasers. When that didn't work either, an officer assigned to security operations fired six shots from his pistol.
This 30-year-old officer, Fabian S., is at the center of the proceedings. The public prosecutor's office accuses him of manslaughter. Two female police officers and one police officer between the ages of 29 and 34 have pleaded guilty to grievous bodily harm in the office due to the inappropriate use of pepper spray and Taser. The public prosecutor's office accuses the service group leader of having instigated his young colleagues.
Did the officers act in self-defense?
During the first review in the Interior Committee of the North Rhine-Westphalian state parliament in early autumn 2022, it became clear that the deployment was not appropriate to the situation from the start. The criminal trial is now primarily concerned with the question of whether the officers can still claim to have acted in self-defense or, in the case of officer S., to protect his colleagues.
What is of considerable importance is how quickly Dramé moved towards the police officers and how dangerous that appeared. It is all the more positive for the defendants that on Wednesday a third social worker from the youth welfare facility remembered that the young person had quickly come out of a niche. “He ran out of the corner.”
Sidy and Lassana Dramé, two of Dramé's brothers and co-plaintiffs, were able to travel from Senegal thanks to donations from a Dortmund support group in order to personally take part in the trial for as many days as possible with their 90-day visas. Although they were not available to answer questions from the media on Wednesday, the two men gave a press conference in late January.
They didn't know that their brother, who was traumatized by the escape, was doing badly, that he wanted to take his own life, that he was in a youth psychiatric facility at the beginning of August 2022, that he had recently expressed several times that he wanted to return to his homeland . Dramé had undertaken the dangerous Mediterranean crossing in a smuggler's boat in order to earn money for his family in Europe. Dramé regularly contacted us via video call to assure that everything was fine. “He always said that if he could do it, he would help us all,” said Sidy Dramé.
#Conflicting #witness #statements #Mouhamed #Dramé #case