Speech crime prosecutions in Germany are initiated with “penalty orders” (Strafbefehle). Basically, to save increasingly scarce judicial resources, the prosecutor can apply for a kind of summary judgment with the court, and the accused gets a letter in the mail, describing their offence and ordering them to pay a fine.
Below, I translate an excerpt from the Strafbefehl that a 64 year-old German woman received last autumn from the prosecutor’s office in Kassel. It details why she is accused of violating section 140 of the German criminal code, which prohibits expressing public approval of criminal acts. I’ve preserved the awkward bureaucratese because it is essential to appreciating how grotesque these prosecutions are. Despite the burdensome syntax, I promise that it’s worth the read:
Against the backdrop of an incident in Sweden in which a 15-year-old girl who had allegedly been raped lured her alleged perpetrator into an ambush long after the alleged crime, under false pretenses, where she, together with her boyfriend and his three brothers, in an act of unjustified vigilante justice, caused him to be robbed and then hanged in what amounted to an execution, for which all five teenagers were sentenced by a Swedish court to prison terms ranging from 3.5 years to life imprisonment, user “Free-Web” posted the following message on 26 October 2024, on “X” (formerly Twitter), where it was publicly accessible:
“A 15-YEAR-OLD SWEDISH GIRL HANGED THE MIGRANT WHO RAPED HER” with the addition “Does he have 77 virgins now?”
As user [redacted], you agreed with this post on the same day at around 7:25 p.m. by clicking “thumbs up” three times. In doing so, you were aware that you were publicly condoning intentional killing by way of unjustified vigilante justice, and you were particularly pleased that this vigilante justice was carried out on a migrant, whom you also – by adopting the statements of user “Free-Web” as your own – sought to mock further by referring to heavenly virgins (you had no objective knowledge that the victim of the vigilante justice was a Muslim).
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